Tris Hussey's Lifestream

To say we're amazed at just how many devices worked with the built in WWAN support of 10.6 Snow Leopard would be an understatement. Practically everything we threw at it "just plain worked". One thing to note about built-in WWAN support: its not always immediately obvious. The Verizon MiFi and USB760, along with the Sprint U760, 598U, and Compass 597 all appear on desktop upon recognition by the finder, and present the user with software to install. Don't do it! Instead, you need to drag the volume to the trash (or otherwise eject the volume) and then need to wait until the WWAN menubar icon appears, underneath which you will see it say "Initializing...", as shown below:

what you see when 10.6 recognizes your modem

After the initializing process, the finder will present you with a dialog that looks similar to this one:

Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard's WWAN Support will do all the work!

One of the gotchas I hit with Snow Leopard was that I couldn't get my EVDO modem to work under Snow Leopard. The Sierra Wireless app wouldn't recognize the device (oops) and I thought I might be SOL for a while. I was pretty motivated to get this working because a) I pay a pretty penny for the service and b) I'm stuck in the contract for a while.

I thought I had it all working this week, but I was wrong. The "wrong" part came from the silly notion that I should use Sierra's app and drivers. I don't know if the 10.6.1 update did the trick or that I finally found some good steps to get it working, but it's working (so I'm not complaining).

Here's the cool thing: Snow Leopard just gets WWAN devices! All I needed to do was uninstall all the Sierra apps and drivers, reboot, plug in the modem, dismount the volume to install the stuff again, and wait. Snow Leopard found the EVDO modem, put the handy WWAN icon on the menu bar and all I had to do was add the device.

Yeah, just worked. Nice.
http://www.tuaw.com/2009/09/10/software-update-10-6-1-debuts/