Billion 7402GXL and Telstra PrePaid 3G

Another curly one sorted.

I purchased a Billion 7402GXL for a family member so that they could easily share their 3G Internet amongst their burgeoning number of computers.

The usual scenario ensues (with a lack of time to test the device), but one thinks to one's-self "It's a consumer grade product, it should just work!".

The good news is it does work as a 3G router...
Bad news - for Telstra Pre-Paid Internet users, there are some parameters that need to be entered and one modification to be made to the Internet stick.

The most obvious first question that everyone asks, is "what is the APN"??

For a Telstra pre-paid 3G Internet stick, use the following:

Telstra.Internet

The hard part is switching the modem to not present a CD-ROM before the modem.
You may have noticed that the Internet stick presents a CD-ROM image from which you can install the drivers and associated software to use the Internet stick - it's a very cunning design that reduces the cost of manufacture (no more CD's required) and obviously you can't lose the drivers! Add in the fact that it can be updated as well and the concept is nearly perfect...

The 7402GXL seems to get very confused by this behaviour, so we need to turn it off.

To turn off the "CD-ROM" feature, you need a serial terminal (some say that Hyperterminal works, but you may have to kill the Telstra software from the Task Manager to allow you to connect to the port) personally I use a copy of Ubuntu 10.10 I have lying around and it automatically detects it and switches to the modem mode.

Then fire up your favourite serial terminal emulator (I use kermit) and connect to the appropriate usb port. In my case it was /dev/ttyUSB1.
From there issue the command:

AT+ZCDRUN=8

And the problem is solved. If you ever need the CD-ROM back again, it is as simple as issuing the following command:

AT+ZCDRUN=9

From there the Billion 7402GXL (and presumably it's 7404GXL brethren) works just fine with the Telstra 3G Pre-Paid Internet stick.