14 DAY TRIAL // Ubuntu 14.10 (Utopic Unicorn) will feature much better support for mobile modems (3G or otherwise) by the time of the launch.
One of the problems with Ubuntu that seems to be mentioned quite a lot is the proper lack of support for mobile modems. This might not look like a big problem, but the mobile modems are being used on a much larger scale than 2 or 3 years ago and the rate of adoption for this kind of devices is not slowing down.
The mobile modems are now in great demand, especially for people who are using their Internet plan on the road. Mobile Internet is becoming a lot cheaper and companies have started selling modems to people who want to have online access on their laptop and still use their phone.
Why the lack of support?
As you all know very well, Ubuntu is based on Debian and many of the packages in the Ubuntu system actually come from Debian’s side, and that includes a library called usb-modeswitch, which actually provides support for numerous 3G mobile modems.
For some reason, the library used in Ubuntu is rather old and there has been a series of updates for usb-modeswitch that never made it. This left the Ubuntu users unable to use their modems. It turns out that usb_modeswitch_dispatcher has been ported to C and newer usb-modeswitch versions can't be synced with Debian.
There already are a number of bug reports on Launchpad, and someone jolted the procedure a little bit by going to the mailing list and putting some pressure on the Ubuntu devs.
"I'm writing to you because Ubuntu has an important problem for today's users - lots of 3G/mobile USB modems are poorly supported in Ubuntu because of outdated usb-modeswitch (2.1.0). Ubuntu's usb_modeswitch_dispatcher should be patched againt because of introduction of parameter 'HuaweiNewMode', wrapping the standard bulk message for all newer Huawei devices and support for generic fallback config files, combined with OS switch (per vendor ID)."
"Lots of other Huawei related issues, like bug #1308895 are fixed in updated usb-modeswitch (2.2.0+repack0-2) and usb-modeswitch-data (20140529-1) packages in Debian unstable. Please merge usb-modeswitch 2.2.0+repack0-2 package from Debian unstable to Ubuntu Utopic," writes a developer on the mailing list.
What's being done about it
The Ubuntu development cycle has passed the Software freeze point for some time and that means that there is going to be an exception for this particular package. It's not something unusual, but things should be ready in time for the Ubuntu 14.10 release.
Ubuntu developer and maintainer Mathieu Trudel-Lapierre confirms the fact that the merge will be done shortly. This means that Ubuntu 14.10 will feature much better mobile modem support, although it would be nice if the changes could be backported to Ubuntu 14.04 LTS as well.