Apple WWAN Support Update 1.0 – Oh Dear

I held off installing this update for about a month figuring that it could intefere with my Novatel Merlin UX870 3G wireless card, and I made a note to go looking online for any problems before installing it. Well slackness and curiosity got the better of me and I decided to give it a go. Unfortunately my fears were realised.

I used to have my MacBook Pro set up to connect to the internet via the card using Three (Hutchison) Australia, however after the update my settings were blown away. Worse, my menu bar started having an endless fit, relaunching over and over. Briefly I would see a new icon from the WWAN Support Update appearing giving me signal strength before it crashed. Over and over. Removing the wireless card restored my menu bar to normality.

I see that some people had their airport connections stop working after applying this update, but this hasn’t happened to me. MacFixit have an article talking about this issue.

I’m also regularly astounded that Apple don’t supply any sort of software removal tool. They go to the trouble of packing their software and keeping the package descriptions under /Library/Receipts/ but there’s no automated way of removing a software update of software installation save finding all the files and deleting them manually, and hoping that the package only added new files…

So if you doubleclick on /Library/Receipts/WWANSupport_Update.pkg and then go to File -> Show Files, you can see a list of files it installs. You can then remove them by manually finding each and dragging it to the trash, or opening up Terminal and running the following commands:

cd /Library/Modem Scripts
sudo rm “WWAN Support”

cd /System/Library/CoreServices/Menu Extras
sudo rm -R WWAN.menu

cd /System/Library/Extensions/IOSerialFamily.kext/Contents/PlugIns
sudo rm -R AppleWWANSupport.kext
sudo rm -R AppleWWANVerizon.kext

Now, download the driver again for the Merlin XU870 and install it, and then follow the instructions on that page to configure it up. For Three Australia you use a ‘phone number’ of “3NetAccess”, and leave Username and Password blank.