Vodafone 3G stick (Huawei K3765) on Bewan

PauloMN

I have Vodafone Home Broadband with a Bewan router - this has a USB slot for a 3G stick as backup. From what I can see, you should just be able to plug the 3G stick in and if the DSL broadband ever goes down (like tonight), the 3G stick should take over and all machines on the network should be able to get internet access via it.

My Bewan doesn't seem to recognise the 3G stick though. Has anyone managed to get this stick to work on the Bewan? There's no instructions with either the router or the 3G stick on how to get this to work.

I've also not been able to get the stick to work on Vista, only works on XP, but that's a seperate issue. I really need to get rid of this yolk as it's currently useless to me.

wally2340

I'm having a similar problem Paulo, did you have any luck in fixing it?

PauloMN

No, I ended up ditching the Bewan router and I bought a second-hand Huawei HG556a router (also branded Vodafone, looks exactly the same as the Bewan router). The 3G stick works perfectly with the Huawei router. It seems the Bewan one just doesn't support that 3G stick at all.

Vodafone were not much help at all on the issue to be honest - they just wanted me to buy a brand new router. It's poor form imo that when you have your mobiles with VF, the top VF broadband and calls pack, and a VF 3G stick, that they would not swap out the router to one that supported the 3G stick they sell!

Anyway, take a look on Adverts.ie, plenty of them for sale up there for cheap (like €10 up).

wally2340

Brilliant! Thanks for that, I won't expect an informative reply to my e-mail from Vodafone so. Is there much messing with settings etc with the router you got?

PauloMN

There was a bit of setting up involved for my situation here, purely because I had a lot of stuff setup on the Bewan (ports open to allow traffic, fixed IPs for certain machines on the network, Dynamic DNS, NAT etc.) - but this is just done once, and you can backup all settings on the Huawei router. All this setting up is not required if you are purely using the router for internet access.

The only thing you'll need to do is set the new WPA key on each wireless device you connect to the router - this key will be printed on the back of the router. Do a full reset to revert the router back to factory settings, and upgrade the firmware (should be available somewhere on the VF site with instructions). I had some problems with my router dropping the wireless connections until I updated the firmware.

Then there's a setting for the 3G backup - very few things to worry about, just how you want it to handle the 3G backup i.e. whether to automatically revert to 3G if the DSL connection drops out etc..

If you get one and need a hand with anything on it, drop me a PM.

wally2340

Can't thank you enough for this, greatly appreciated! Think I have sourced the router you told me about so if you don't mind I might touch base with you if i run into more problems!

Cheers!