I’m quite pleased with 3 Mobile Broad­band, the only ser­i­ous issue was a daily ker­nel panic…and since there are no bet­ter drivers from Hua­wei, the solu­tion was not to use those drivers, but to plug the 3G dongle into a non-​OS X machine.

I tested a Bil­lion BiPAC 7402NX router, it works per­fectly, but it is not a mobile solu­tion. I actu­ally don’t need addi­tional hard­ware to run Linux, using VMware I installed Ubuntu 9.04 Desktop Edi­tion, which can use the USB dongle; the new issue was in hav­ing the host OS X sys­tem use that Linux instance as a gateway.

After hours of fid­dling with VMware and OS X net­work set­tings, I ended up using this setup:

• VMware vir­tual machine net­work set to NAT, eth0 con­figured manu­ally (such that it will use eth0 con­nec­tion only for resources on that network)
• A squid3 proxy server (set to listen on 0.0.0.0 and accept con­nec­tions from private IPs)
• In OS X a net­work loc­a­tion set­ting that uses the Ubuntu instance’s IP as proxy and with
• a Wi-​Fi net­work cre­ated with Air­Port (to get an IP for the OS X, and have my iPod Touch con­nect to internet).