Sprint Novatel Ovation U720 USB phone very slow on Fedora

[Arch Willingham]

I am trying to install a Sprint Mobile Broadband USB Modem (Novatel Ovation U720) cellular USB phone on a Dell laptop running FC7 test4. I found a variety of instructions on getting it to work with FC6 and applied it to my install and it works..sort of.

I have the laptop set to dual boot with XP. I first made sure it worked under XP. It does and it extremely fast. I then did the install on FC7. After issuing "/sbin/modprobe usbserial vendor=0×1410 product=0×2110". Once that was done, the modem appeared as /dev/ttyUSB0 and /dev/ttyUSB1 (someone said they think the latter is a management and diagnostic interface; the former is used for the PPP connection). I was then able to use KPPP to set up a dialer connection. I started the dialer and bam it connected. Once connected I see this:

# ifconfig
lo        Link encap:Local Loopback  
          inet addr:127.0.0.1  Mask:255.0.0.0
          inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host
          UP LOOPBACK RUNNING  MTU:16436  Metric:1
          RX packets:3249 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:3249 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:0 
          RX bytes:13067764 (12.4 MiB)  TX bytes:13067764 (12.4 MiB)

ppp0      Link encap:Point-to-Point Protocol  
          inet addr:xx.11.222.aa  P-t-P:yy.28.249.bb  Mask:255.255.255.255
          UP POINTOPOINT RUNNING NOARP MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:3850 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:3463 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:3 
          RX bytes:3681723 (3.5 MiB)  TX bytes:532348 (519.8 KiB)

The only problem is that it is slow as glue. When I click on a website, it takes 30 to 90 seconds to respond. Once it actually starts pulling data, it seems a little quicker but then bogs down when trying to go to the next website. I manually changed the "serial" bit rate in the configuration files to the same way it was set in XP (230400 bps) but that did not help.

In XP, the IP is set as follows:

Connected to NDIS:
	Intel(R) PRO/100 VE Network Connection - Packet Scheduler Miniport
		GUID:	TRUCK4FC-E323-407D-B802-9D7F4412345
		MAC Address:		00-14-3F-F5-1F-CB
		Type:			Ethernet Adapter
		IPAddresses:		0.0.0.0
		Gateway Addresses:	
		DHCP Enabled.
			Lease Obtained Sun Aug 06 23:28:58 2006
			Lease Expires Sun Aug 06 23:28:58 2006
		DHCP Server Addresses:	192.168.1.1
		WINS Disabled.


	WAN (PPP/SLIP) Interface
		GUID:	1234FAEE-F7D6-49F8-A71E-E9666BB54321
		MAC Address:		00-53-45-00-00-00
		Type:			PPP Adapter
		IPAddresses:		YY.243.236.BB
		Gateway Addresses:	YY.243.236.BB
		DHCP Disabled.
		WINS Disabled. 

Does anyone have any ideas?

Arch