ISI specifications for Nokia modems.

A serious limitation of the N900 connectivity subsystem IMHO is the inability to create multiple connections. One can only have one connection at a time. This was a problem when I started investigating MMS support for N900.

Of course one can use some undocumented API like fMMS to have more than one GPRS connection. There's only 1 problem with that approach. You can end up with IP/subnet clash.

I've been thinking about a kind of hacky solution for the MMS problem: Let's have a tun interface with a known IP such as or 192.0.2.x. We force all of our traffic through that interface and "something" sits in the middle to route the data between tun and the GPRS modem.

Sounds easy but not that easy.

The only information available about ISI modems and GPRS manipulation is some patches adding GPRS support to Ofono.

I've been playing with them for a few days. I managed to get a PDP context which fails to activate.

Hmmm, Googling a bit revealed the Symbian Modem Adaptation project. The code is there but it wasn't enough.

What I didn't notice initially was a semi-hidden link to the wireless modem API server. There I found not only complete documentation for ISI; but also header files with al the constants. More than the ones available from the GPRS patches.

Now manipulating the modem is just the matter of reading the documentation (READ the license aggrement first before you get them), creating a bunch of phonet sockets, using sendmsg() and recvfrom() and parsing the output.

Now I wont wonder why does my phonet packet:

look different than the one sent by the connection manager:

I'm using 0x0e while they use 0x0c

There'a also a hidden excel (DUH!) sheet showing which ISI API is mandatory and which is not.

Happy hacking!

P.S. This might be old information but I've just discovered it.