Installing the Huawei E220 on a Mac

So. You have a Mac OSX and you’re a Telia user, or using any other ISP, and you buy this wonderful wireless 3G internet package. You receive a parcel with the little egg-looking modem (the Huawei E220) and the shiny USB-cable. All the documentation is for Windows and the only thing people have used it for are PCs. Now what?

First thing you should try is to use the built-in drivers available on the modem itself. See, the little egg works like both a storage device and a modem, and on the storage part are included drivers for both Windows and Mac.
As a Mac user, you will only see the Mac drivers, and as a Windows user it’s vice versa, so you do not have to worry about choosing the wrong drivers. Open Finder and click on the newly appeared device in the left-hand bar, and proceed by double-clicking the Mobile Connect.app. However, the installer is very buggy and for some it just does not work.

If all goes well and you do manage to install it, just run the application and use the internet! If you’re unlucky, it will, as I mentioned, briefly open and then close itself. You need to get a driver from the Huawei homepage. Fortunately I’ve fetched up the drivers for you (it was kind of hard to find one’s way around, I can tell you that), you can directly download the driver from over here.

The file being downloaded on your harddrive is called just plain “E220” without any extension. You won’t be able to do much with it in it’s current state, so to proceed you must rename it to “E220.dmg“. Now just double-click it, let it mount and run the installer – it should take you through the installation process and configure everything for you!

The new and updated driver will be an .ISO-file and will mount itself! Install the driver and enjoy the modem.

Congratulations on getting fairly good 3G internet anywhere in the world (depending on coverage, of course)!