Verizon AirPrime 5220 on MacOS X

The AirPrime 5220 The AirPrime 5220 is the 1xEVDO card currently used by Verizon Wireless under the moniker of "broadband high speed wireless." A picture of the card I have is on the right. This page describes how to use the aforementioned card with a Macintosh running MacOS X. Starting with version 1.2 Beta of the driver high speed downloads are supported! I've seen speeds in excess of 100Kbytes per second when downloading some of the larger files from my web site. There may still be some problems with upload performance. If you experience such problems please provide feedback on the mailing list. If you have a Sierra Wireless 1xRTT card Alex Snoeren has a page detailing how to use that card with MacOS X. In fact, some of the information on this page was gleaned from Alex's page. Step 1: Activate your card Activating the card currently requires a Windows machine. Once activated, the Windows machine is no longer necessary. Follow the activation directions included with the card when activating it using Windows. Step 2: Install the Driver Download my AirPrime 5220 driver installer package by clicking here. Then install it as you would any other MacOS X package (double click it and follow the directions). It is safe to use the package to install over a previous hand installation. For those interested, install by hand directions, remove by hand directions, and a full description of the driver with links to the xcode project are available at the end of this page. Presently I have tested the driver only with OS 10.3 (aka Panther). Step 3: Configure the card If the card is already in the machine, remove it and reinsert it. Open up network preferences, and select "AirPrime CDMA Wireless PC Card" from the "show" menu. Click the "PPP" tab and configure as follows: Phone Number: #777 Account Name: xxxxxxxxxx@vzw3g.com (Your phone number) Password: vzw Then click on the "Modem" tab and select "AirPrime 5220" from the "Modem:" popup menu. All other settings should be left alone. Apply the changes. Step 4: Connect and Enjoy! Use Internet Connect in the standard way to dial up and enjoy your wireless internet connection! Please provide feedback about this driver via the mailing list, both positive and otherwise, so I can continue to make improvements.

Sign up for EVDO service here [details]

1. Make sure the 5220 card is NOT inserted in the computer.
2. Compile the xcode project found in the "AirPrime 5220 EVDO Driver" folder.
3. Open up Terminal.app, found in the Utilities folder inside the Applications folder. Once Terminal.app is open, change directories in the command line window to the compiled source directory. The easiest way to do this is to type "cd" followed by a space, then drag and drop the "AirPrime 5220 EVDO Driver" folder into the terminal window, and hit return.
4. Change the ownership of the kernel extension to root, and group wheel. This command may ask you for your password. If so, enter it. Note you must do all these steps from an "Administrator" account:

           % sudo chown -R root.wheel build/AirPrime5220Driver.kext
   

5. Move the driver into the System folder, so OS X can find it:

           % sudo mv build/AirPrime5220Driver.kext /System/Library/Extensions
   

6. Rebuild the kernel extension cache:

           % sudo rm /System/Library/Extensions.kextcache
           % sudo kextcache -k /System/Library/Extensions
   

7. Force the kernel extension daemon to reload the cache. You can do this by either rebooting your machine, or by typing:

           % ps ax | grep kextd
   

   You should see a list that looks something like:

             87  ??  Ss     0:01.92 kextd
           3759 std  R+     0:00.00 grep kextd
   

   Locate the kextd entry by looking in the far right column for "kextd" and not "grep kextd". Once the kext entry is found, note the process number in the far left column. In the above example the process number is "87". They type:

           % kill -HUP 87
   

   Replacing "87" with the process number you noted above. If you somehow mess up this process the safest way to recover is to reboot your machine.
8. Install the modem script (note the quotes, they are very important):

           % sudo cp "AirPrime 5220 Modem Script" "/Library/Modem Scripts/AirPrime 5220"
   

   You must quit the "System Preferences" program and open it again before it will see the new modem script.
9. Close the terminal window (by typing "exit"), and quit Terminal.app if desired.
10. Continue with the configuration directions described above.

1. Remove the AirPrime card from your system.
2. If the AirPrime driver was loaded, unload it. Typically the driver will only be loaded if you just had the card in your system. To check if the driver is loaded, do the following from the command line:

           % kextstat | grep AirPrime5220Driver
   

   If the command doesn't produce any output the driver isn't loaded. On the other hand, if the output looks similar to:

           100    0 0x1afea000 0x33000    0x32000     com.bellardo.driver.AirPrime5220Driver
   

   then the driver is currently loaded and needs to be unloaded. To unload the driver type:

           % sudo kextunload /System/Library/Extensions/AirPrime5220Driver.kext
   

   from an Administrator account. It will probably prompt you for the account's password.
3. Remove the driver from the Extensions folder. You can do this one of two ways. The safest way is to use the Finder. Go to /System/Library/Extensions and move AirPrime5220Driver.kext into the trash. Alternatively you can delete the driver from the command prompt, but this is more dangerous. To delete it from the command prompt type:

           % sudo rm -rf /System/Library/Extensions/AirPrime5220Driver.kext
   

4. Remove the kext cache. Do this by executing the following command at the command prompt:

           % sudo rm /System/Library/Extensions.kextcache
   

5. Rebuild the kextcache by executing the following from the command prompt:

           % sudo kextcache -k /System/Library/Extensions
   

6. Remove the modem script by doing the following at the command prompt:

           % sudo rm "/Library/Modem Scripts/AirPrime 5220"
   

7. And lastly, reboot your machine.

Background

How it works

If you already have service it is still worthwhile to contact Robert. In certain circumstances he may be able to reduce your monthly bill and provide you with superior customer support. Whatever you decide to do don't worry, you will still have unlimited access to the driver and all the same technical support. Robert has also agreed to share the commission on non-Mac EVDO service and non-EVDO service with me too! So if you are in the market for cellular products, but already have EVDO service, give Robert a call and you will still be supporting me.

Sign me up!

But I already have a service agreement!

How this effects the driver

Feedback

The AirPrime 5220 Card

The modem device has one configuration with one interface. That interface has three pipes - control, bulk in, and bulk out. The bulk pipes are the important ones. When taken together the bulk pipes form a full duplex communication stream to the modem on the CDMA card. This modem uses standard AT command set commands, and requires no further configuration to operate. Since the modem stream requires no configuration the control pipe can effectively be ignored. No doubt there is good information to be had (like the activation sequence) from the control pipe, but it is strictly undocumented and unnecessary for simply connecting to the Internet.

To save some time digging through my modem script, the initialization sequence I used was:

ATE0V1&F&D2&C1&C2S0=0
ATE0V1
ATS7=60

MacOS X AirPrime 5220 Driver Details

I started with the AppleUSBCDCSampleDriver example driver. This is a USB device class driver for the communication device class. In essence it is a USB modem driver, which is pretty much what we need in this circumstance. I changed a number of mundane settings so it wouldn't conflict with any other version of AppleUSBCDCSampleDriver that might happen to be installed on the machine. Then I changed the matching dictionary so the driver would match against the AirPrime card. After that was the tricky part. The AirPrime card is not a USB communication device class (CDC) device. There was a fair amount of code in the sample driver that probed for, and determined the capabilities of, CDC devices. I had to remove this code. The sample driver also sent a number of CDC control commands to the device, but since we don't know the control protocol of the AirPrime, this code also had to be removed. These changes resulted in a working driver. You can download my xcode project by clicking here.

After the driver was operational it was simply a matter of modifying a modem script with the correct initialization parameters and configuring the network interface as described above. Then I was off and to the races!

Older Versions of the Driver