Andrew Ferrier

As I’ve written about before, I use a combination of Vodafone 3G and the AT&T Network Client on Windows to access my corporate VPN. Recently, I’ve been seeing this error a lot when ‘dialling’ the 3G network (I connect it via the Windows dialler, rather than the Vodafone client):

This morning, I figured out what it was that was causing the problem. AT&T was open when I was dialling, and had the modem selected in the ‘Cellular’ tab (which I don’t normally use):

I hypothesise that it’s got a lock on the modem when this is selected (even if the ‘Cellular’ tab is not selected). Quitting the AT&T client appears to allow the connection to be created. You can then restart it and connect to the VPN in the normal way (using ‘existing internet connection’).

Hope this helps someone.

If you’re anything like me, you hate the Vodafone Mobile Connect client - it’s buggy, unstable, and requires frequent reboots/restarts/taking-the-card-out-and-putting-it-back-in-again to make it work. What I only discovered today – although I should have known from ancient dial-up modem connections years ago – was that you can just use the regular ‘Network Connections’ facility of Windows. Just locate the ‘Vodafone Mobile Connect’ entry, right-click and select ‘Connect’ (I think this will only appear once you’ve installed the Vodafone software):

Easy-peasy connectivity. You can still track how many bytes have been uploaded/downloaded in the current session by turning on ‘Show icon in notification area when connected’ from the Connection’s Properties dialog. You’ll then see an icon in the system tray with a pop-up showing usage. Sadly, this is only for the current session, not the month as a whole – haven’t yet found a decent bit of software to do that (surprisingly).