I’ve been spending a lot of time on the road lately, and as a result I’m starting to get very tired of the slow WiFi speeds in your average coffee shop. To try and solve the problem, I stopped by my local T-Mobile store the other day and picked up prepaid T-Mobile Rocket 4G device. But on plugging it in, I was surprised to see the T-Mobile Connection Manager application just sit there, stating “Checking Device”. Reinstalling and flashing the firmware on the device seemed to do nothing.
After some Googling, I quickly discovered that T-Mobile apparently does not officially support Mac OS X Lion (10.7) on the Rocket 4G device. (Gee, thanks for mentioning that, guys! Lion has only been released for close to six months now, but I guess that’s a minor detail.)
However, buried deep in the Google results, there is a solution! A user on the T-Mobile Support Forums by the name of arnaudsj managed to diagnose the problem: T-Mobile’s driver installer only pushes a 32-bit version of libsqlite. The simple solution is to remove it, allowing the driver to use Lion’s stock 64-bit libsqlite:
sudo mv /opt/dplat/lib/libsqlite3.dylib /opt/dplat/lib/libsqlite3.orig
Sure enough, running this command solves the problem. The T-Mobile Connection Manager app seems to recognize that something’s awry and pops up an error stating “Please uninstall the old Connection Manager and reinsert the modem for new Connection Manager install”, but as long as you just leave that message open (don’t click OK or the Connection Manager will quit), the device will now work perfectly!
Props to arnaudsj for the solution — just thought I’d blog it to try and get the word out to anyone else experiencing this problem.