Getting BT’s Type 2 mobile broadband dongle to work can be a bit of a pain. While BT support Windows 7 in the latest version of the connection manager the 64bit support still seems to be broken.
There isn’t a great deal of info about fixing this but I ran through a few things and thought I’d drop out a note explaining how I managed to get the infernal device working.
For reference this refers to the Type 2 dongle ZTE MF636 that looks like this:
First get the latest version of the software from here:
http://bt.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/12873/related/1
Plug in your dongle and install it, once it’s installed if everything just works and you can connect then you probably never even got to see this page. If you get a window that looks a bit like this…
…despite having a nice green/blue LED on your dongle then press on.
Close the connection manager and download the Windows 7 Driver Tool (Win7_DriverTool.zip) from this page:
http://www.zte.com.au/telstra/Product_Downloads/MF636_downloads.htm
Unzip it and run the installer, click next and it will tell you that it’s finished the install. During and/or after the install your device manager should go a little crazy and drivers will start to be installed, once it’s settled down and “your device is ready for use” then fire up the connection manager. After a minute or so it should detect your dongle and give you the option to connect.
