Network manager
This section explores the use of network manager in combination with the RPi Rasbian OS and the USB interface of the Pilot cellular HAT board.
Network manager can replace the functionality provided by dhcpcd which is installed by default in the current versions (2019) of Raspbian. Network manager has the advantage that it is able to automate the management of many cellular modems as well as managing the usual WiFi and Ethernet network interfaces
For a quick overview of network manager take a look at wikipedia. Network manager has multiple interfaces - graphical, command line and an API. Network manager uses another component called modem manager. Modem manager also has GUI, CLI and API interfaces.
Please be aware that network manager can only manage and check the modems network connectivity, it cannot test if a network connection will support IP traffic. To test that the network connection can transport IP traffic an additional application is needed to perform a link test. For example - in routers the link test function is typically implemented in a separate app that sends / receives periodic ping requests
Quickstart Guide
Click the heading for a quick start guide
Note that during the quick start installation process the Raspbian default method dhcpcd is uninstalled and replaced by network-manager and the network manager GUI is installed as a replacement for the dhcpcd GUI
SIM Information
Click the heading for information on our experiments configuring network manager cellular profiles for different cellular operators SIMs
PiloT Testing Information
Click the heading for information on Pilot / Raspbian / RPi combinations that have been tried
More notes
The method described in the quick start is experimental and has only been tested on a limited set of RPi’s, Rasbian OS variants and PiloT variants
Cellular modems which support the following connectivity methods over USB have been tried
- MBIM
- PPP
For Even more notes
Modem manager
When Network manager is installed modem manager is also installed. A command line interface for modemManager is available - mmcli. It is also possible to install a GUI. For example
$ sudo apt-get install modem-manager-gui
Modem manager can be used for diagnostics and also enables SMS interaction