Mod-3g takes a very long time to discover my telecom network

[fab]

Hi,

I was trying to use wvdial to setup a 3g connection. But it failed, the mod-3g dongle replying ERROR when dialing. After many hours of investigation, and tinkering this olimex modem with minicom, I found out that the modem cannot dial because....no network is yet selected.
I tried to do it through minicom, by sending an AT+COPS=1,2,"20810" (SFR network), and saw that the mod-3g device requested more than 10 minutes to register manually to my network.
Escaping minicom without reseting the modem, did the trick, as wvdial and pppd then established the 3G connection.

Any ideas are welcome to speed up the network discovery....

Of course all other tools such as sakis3g or networkmanager have the same behavior and failed to connect as well for the same reason: No network, no carrier so no dialup possible.
I had many other 3G keys, and there are not issues at all. So it is not a problem of network coverage.

Fab

[MBR]

You can set the AT+COPS=1,2,"20810" as part of the Initx= inistrings (there can be nine of them, see http://linux.die.net/man/5/wvdial.conf), so the wvdial and pppd will do the network selection themselves. Or try to get a manual for that 3G modem, there are special vendor-specific AT commands for varioust things (eg. dispabling internal CD-ROM or such), so there can be even the one for selecting the default network.

[fab]

Hi MBR,

You can set the AT+COPS=1,2,"20810" as part of the Initx= inistrings (there can be nine of them, see http://linux.die.net/man/5/wvdial.conf), so the wvdial and pppd will do the network selection themselves.

,
This is what I am actually doing (to place it in the init string does not change anything). And it takes 10 minutes to discover the network as I explained.

Or try to get a manual for that 3G modem, there are special vendor-specific AT commands for varioust things (eg. dispabling internal CD-ROM or such), so there can be even the one for selecting the default network.

This is modem, I bought from Olimex....!

Fab