The device was initially registered with Verizon using the VZaccess application on Windows. This may be a step that requires their annoy-ware. After that initial stage, the device contains an embedded phone number, that is required to do proper logging-in for National Access / Broadband Access.

Plugging this into a spare USB port on my Fedora Linux laptop (and looking in

) showed that Fedora 7 recognizes the device ‘out of the box’, without any special modifications. Visually, after a short pause upon insertion, the yellow/green light switches from off to constantly on.

In order to set up

properly, you need to find the phone number associated with the Verizon modem.

Normally, this is visible in the Windows VZaccess application ‘Help-About’ box. However, for the USB720 I was lent, this box just said ‘Unable to read hardware’ (or something to that effect.

To discover the phone number, I fired up

and (after changing the modem device to

, and the rate to 19200N1) saw that the modem was responding to the slew of commands that

had in its initialization step. Then, from a helpful (but ad-laden site) I found the following commands to type into the

interactive terminal :

Bingo!

I believe (untested, but seen many places) that the correct

setup includes the following (where the PhoneNumber is as found using

as above) :

There are various scripts and tweaks available, but the above seems like a major trick that isn’t so readily available.

Here’s something that definitely works

Into

put :

Where XXXYYYZZZZ is the phone number from above.

Into

put :

To start the connection use:

If the DNS doesn’t seem to be picking up, have a look at /var/log/messages for the Primary DNS, and edit /etc/resolv.conf manually (in my case doing

works). Running /sbin/dhclient-script can also do the trick.