Those of your who have tried connecting an O2 Huawei E173 with giffgaff sim to a Mac running system 10.7 (Lion) will find that the device is not recognised. As far as I know the dongles still work fine with 10.6 and below as this is 32 bit OS and not 64 bit as Lion is. In summary the dongle and sim card are not at fault, it is the new Mac OS that cannot see the dongle, it needs a driver installed. I will now add instructions to get the Huawei driver from 3!! (of all people!) and then install so your mac can see the dongle. It will then work 100% with the existing giffgaff dongle settings. I can't take credit for the following instructions, thanks to Sam Moffatt, but they definitely work with my E173....
Getting your Huawei modem working with Mac OS X Lion
You know the part before the upgrade where they tell you to check all of your applications before you upgrade? Well, last night I decided that it would be a great idea to upgrade my Mac from Snow Leopard to Lion. Turns out that perhaps wasn’t so great an idea after all when my Huawei USB 3G modem dongle decided that it wasn’t going to work since it wasn’t relevant for the new 64-bit only kernel. Oops, I should have checked first. But it isn’t a complete disaster!
After frantically using Google to find a new driver to install and digging around the Huawei site trying to find a replacement driver I was getting to the point of doing some modifications to the com.apple.boot.plist file and restart my Mac with the i386 kernel instead of the x86-64 one that appears to now be the default.
In my many searches for a Mac OS X Lion compatible driver, I managed to find the following from mobile provider “3″ in UK. The link, http://support.three.co.uk/SRVS/CGI-BIN/WEBISAPI.dll/,/?New,Kb=Mobile,Ts=Mobile,T=Device,Case=obj(2465) contains a link to “dongle drivers” for “Huawei dongles” that work for Mac OS X Lion (10.7). Sounds like a winner!
So I download the zip file and it extracts out to leave me with a “3Connect Installer”. Not quite what I want however all is not lost. You see applications on Mac OS X are actually folders in disguise commonly referred to as either “bundles” or “packages”. So right click on the “3Connect Installer” and select “Show Package Contents”. This opens up a view with only “Contents” listed, foiled? Don’t worry, double click into that directory and then into the “Resources” directory. Here we find a “mobilemanager.mpkg” file. Now “mpkg” is a package which means it has more goodies in it.
So we right click on this and select “Show Package Contents” again. We’ve got our “Contents” folder and inside that we want to go to the “Packages” folder. In there two packages exist: “mobile_manager_application.pkg” and “huawei_universal_425_05.pkg”. Now if you’re like me, everything is setup already – you just need the driver. So I skipped the mobile manager application and just double clicked on the “huawei_universal_425_05.pkg” file and installed it.
After installing the Huawei Universal package, the next time I plugged in my Huawei E160 into my Mac it was detected and worked perfectly fine.
