Optus Prepaid Mobile Broadband service in Australia

wallabybob

I have just setup pfSense to work with Optus prepaid wireless broadband service in Australia. Optus currently have some competitive deals involving Huawei E160E and Huawei E1762 USB modems. I selected the E1762. I followed the procedure in http://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/Configuring_3G_modems The modem was recognised by the u3g driver on plugin. I used snapshot build 2.0-BETA4 (i386)
built on Wed Aug 11 17:24:00 EDT 2010
FreeBSD 8.1-RELEASE

I have a few comments on the UI which I'll put in a different topic if I can't find them already commented upon and if they apply to a more recent snapshot.

The Optus prepaid service include a data allowance and SMS allowance. Is there some pfSense software to send and receive SMS? In particular, the Optus service requires activation through a web page which results in transmission of a SMS containing the service number which is required for recharge and a SMS containing 'balance' to 9999 returns in SMS the remaining data and SMS allowance.

eri--

As of yet no.
Shouldn't be too hard to do it though. Patches accepted as always.

cmb

You can also get SMS for online billing or other purposes from the carrier (I have from Verizon). In that case, I move the card to my Mac to get the SMS. There are no open source utilities to get those AFAIK.

wallabybob

@cmb:

There are no open source utilities to get those AFAIK.

I have found:

smstools - http://smstools3.kekekasvi.com/
wammu - http://wammu.eu/
umtsmon - http://umtsmon.sourceforge.net/

I don't yet have any experience with any of these.

gnhb

I'm interested in this also. Ermal and Chris, do you have any ideas or suggestions about the GUI and backend design for this feature, or where the GUI would even fit in to the menu scheme?

Ermal is right, it shouldn't be too hard to do. That serial port utility I was going on about a few months ago would be a handy tool for this situation too.
http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,23955.msg128271.html#msg128271

Any news on that?

GB

eri--

In Status->Interfaces?!

cmb

@gnhb:

I'm interested in this also. Ermal and Chris, do you have any ideas or suggestions about the GUI and backend design for this feature, or where the GUI would even fit in to the menu scheme?

Not sure. Status>Interfaces isn't exactly intuitive for something like that, but probably the best place I can think of. Don't want to add yet another menu item just for that.

@gnhb:

Ermal is right, it shouldn't be too hard to do. That serial port utility I was going on about a few months ago would be a handy tool for this situation too.
http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,23955.msg128271.html#msg128271

Any news on that?

No plans for any changes there in the near future.