Sierra Wireless MC7700 Not Working with Thinkpad T520

1

So I have a T520 with the whitelist removed. I have bought and installed a Sierra Wireless MC7700 to put in it, and I’ve gotten the drivers installed, windows 10 sees the card in the settings, but no matter what I do, I absolutely cannot turn it on. It is stuck “Turned Off”. I diagnose it in Network Adapters and it says the physical switch is off, but this laptop does not have a physical switch for the mobile card.

I switch over to Ubuntu to try it, and I’m facing another different issue. No matter what I try or what combination or order that I hook my antenna wires up in, I have 0% signal to nothing. I know the antennas work, because I also have a F5521gw that works perfectly fine with AT&T and connects.

Does anyone have any ideas for what is going on?

EDIT: In ubuntu, the modem actually shows it’s state as Disabled, when I try to enable it, I get this error:

sudo mmcli -m 0 --enable --timeout=120
error: couldn’t enable the modem: ‘GDBus.ErrorSmiley Surprisedrg.freedesktop.libqmi.Error.Protocol.HardwareRestricted: Couldn’t set operating mode: QMI protocol error (83): ‘HardwareRestricted’’

2

So upon further testing with this card, I did figure out that the latest driver that Sierra Wireless has on the website I guess is expecting a physical hardware switch for the WWAN, and this laptop does not have one. I had to fall back on an older version of the driver in combination with the Skylink software to get the card to turn on, but once it has turned on, I absolutely cannot get it to connect to anything. It shows no service, no matter what I try to do, or in what order I hook the antenna wires up at.

3

Hi @codypwhite1
Are you able to check and share response for below AT cmd? Hope to find more info from there…
ATi
AT!GSTATUS?
AT!PCINFO?
AT+CPIN?
AT+CREG?
AT+CSQ
AT+COPS?
AT+COPS=?
AT+CGDCONT?
AT!SKU?

By the way, may I ask from where you buy this MC7700?
Thx