Huawei E3131 on Ubuntu 15.10

This post is about getting the Huawei E3131 usb modem to work smoothly on Ubuntu 15.10. If you are a user who is using this modem you must have experienced that the modem fails to connect on a cold start. You need to unplug it and plug it again after you logged in to get the modem working. Well while doing some digging in the internet i came across the following bug report which helped me to fix the problem.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/usb-modeswitch-data/+bug/1192297

What i did was the following

• Copy /lib/udev/rules.d/40-usb_modeswitch.rules to /etc/udev/rules.d/40-usb_modeswitch.rules 
• Edit /etc/udev/rules.d/40-usb_modeswitch.rules and add the following rule at the end of the rule list. Make sure its above the LABEL

# Huawei E3131H
ATTR{idVendor}=="12d1", ATTR{idProduct}=="14fe", RUN+="/usr/sbin/usb_modeswitch -v12d1 -p14fe -J"

• Comment the following rule as below

# Generic entry for all Huawei devices, excluding Android phones
# ATTRS{idVendor}=="12d1", ATTRS{manufacturer}!="Android", ATTR{bInterfaceNumber}=="00", ATTR{bInterfaceClass}=="08", RUN+="usb_modeswitch '%b/%k'"

Thais it with the configuration. Now shutdown the pc and start it to see if it is working :)

Update:

The configuration file is no longer needed since the rule uses the huawei mode switch.