= Features/MoreMobileBroadband =
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/MoreMobileBroadband
Feature owner(s): Dan Williams <dcbw at redhat dot com>
New mobile broadband devices supporting multiple technologies (eg,
CDMA/EVDO/LTE and/or GSM/UMTS/LTE) and using new proprietary protocols are
becoming common in the marketplace, and are not well supported by ModemManager
0.6 and earlier. We developed ModemManager 0.7/0.8 with a new API specifically
to address this issue and to be more compatible with future mobile broadband
devices.
== Detailed description ==
Multi-mode Qualcomm-based devices have on the market since 2009 and support
multiple WWAN technologies, often at the same time or with a runtime firmware
change. CDMA-based carriers migrating to LTE (like Verizon, Sprint, China
Telecom, KDDI, etc) require these multi-mode devices to ensure that coverage
is not interrupted when handoff between CDMA/EVDO and LTE occurs.
ModemManager 0.6's D-Bus API simply could not be extended to handle these
cases, and due to this, the opportunity was taken to rewrite the API to ensure
future functionality could be more easily supported in the D-Bus API.
Additionally, most newer Qualcomm chipsets (which the majority of phones and
data cards contain) use the proprietary QMI protocol for most operations
instead of their limited AT command port. We have developed the libqmi library
to support these devices, and ModemManager 0.7 and later use libqmi to provide
fully-featured support for these Qualcomm devices.