GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 687901
Unclear actions when multiple modems shown in the network indicator
Last modified: 2012-11-11 18:23:42 UTC
Created attachment 228439 [details] Multiple modems available Note: I'm skipping the discussion about how the current network operator/signal-quality is shown; left that in bug 658230. When only one single modem is available we currently have one global "Mobile Broadband" switch, plus one item for each connection profile that may be activated. The global switch would enable/disable WWAN, and the remaining items would request to connect the modem. In this case, the status of the global switch matches the 'enabling' status of the modem; if the switch is ON the modem is enabled, and if the switch is OFF the modem is disabled. Everything seems quite clear when we only have one modem. When we have more than one modem available, in addition to the previous items we now have an additional item with the name of the modem, and this item also has a switch. See attached image. This comes with some problems: 1) The global switch still enables/disables WWAN, but its status now depends on all the available modems, so, you may end up with one modem enabled/connected and still the global switch would be off (as other modems cannot get enabled). The status of the global switch may be directly linked to the WWAN status in NetworkManager, if that is the case the change should be in NM itself. From my point of view the status of the global switch should be ON if at least one modem is enabled, and OFF if all are enabled. Or, actually, fully remove the global switch and leave each modem to be enabled/disabled separately. 2) The new switches shown for each modem line will actually try to connect the modem if there is a single connection profile. I don't think this is the right thing to do, these switches should just try to enable/disable each modem separately, leaving the connection to the specific connection profile requested. Looking at the picture attached, I have connected one modem using the "Yoigo default" profile; and if I click in the switch for one of the other modems it will try to connect it using the same profile, which may or may not be ok (it would be wrong in this case).
As this is directly related to bug 658230, which proposes to remove the global WWAN switch, I'm going to consolidate them and continue the discussion there. Note however that if the global WWAN switch is the OR or the AND of the status of the two modems depends on NM, the shell is just presenting that information. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 658230 ***