SIM Usage

General Projects and Community
1

Hey there,

I’ve recently bought the Hologram Nova USB Modem (NB-IoT). This is a general question, but in order to use this stick, is it necessary to have the hologram Sim card?

Could I use a Rogers SIM of mine and gain access to the cellular network that way, assuming everything on the Rogers side is taken care of?

Thanks

2

Yes, the Nova is unlocked and should work with other SIM cards assuming the carrier supports Cat-M (or 2G/3G for the U201 Nova). You may need to set the APN manually.

3

I had inserted my sim and a solid red light was visible. However, if i run the modem network connect command in the terminal window (I have a Raspberry pi setup), it keeps giving the error “Failed to start PPP”. Any ideas how to solve this?

I have already installed the necessary and updated packages.

Thanks

4

Ah, so while the modem itself will work, it’s possible that some SDK commands may not as I think we set the hologram APN in some spots. Also some carriers block PPP sessions from starting up like that.

Try running with the -vv flag to generate more logging output as that might be helpful.

You can also get raw PPP files to edit here: hologram-tools/ppp at master · hologram-io/hologram-tools · GitHub

5

So in the event that the carrier is blocking it from starting in that way, is there any alternative methods to get the modem stick a network connection?

Or is running “sudo modem network connect” the only way to trigger the connection?

6

If you use those raw ppp files, you would install them on the pi in /etc/ppp/peers and /etc/chatscripts and then you use the built-in ppp tools pon and poff to start and stop ppp respectively. (pon nova-m and poff nova-m)

The reason you would use these is that you can add a line in the chatscript to set the APN. It would be something like:
AT+CGDCONT=0,"IP","yourapn"

7

The modem itself has a network stack too by the way. If you just need to send messages to a server, you can use that. See the UBlox R410 AT command docs on that.

8

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