Vodafone / Vodacom 3G in South Africa

17 May 2010

I’m in South Africa for 2 weeks and am using a Vodafone Huawei USB 3G card on my Macbook Pro with Snow Leopard. Here are a few tips I found useful:

Brandon West’s post was very useful in getting started.

Summary: Download and install VodafoneMCInstaller then add the 3G card as a network interface and change the settings as mentioned in Brandon’s post.

To get online you’ll need to open the Vodafone application, and use the 3G card’s pin number to Activate your modem every time you connect. Once activated, you need to then dial up the modem using the Network panel in System Preferences.

Because your Vodacom 3G account is a metered account, and I’m not used to conserving bandwidth in any way, I found SurplusMeter very useful to watch my usage.