I realized I owed the ether an update with regards to the mobile broadband saga!
Ordered the appropriate device off of Ebay and it showed up a few days later. Opening up the laptop was fairly trivial (god bless ruggedized laptops!) and I made the swap in about 20 minutes or so. After that, fired it up and….
It still didn’t do too much.
After a few driver packages, a firmware update and a whole slew of AT commands and netsh mbn commands, it connected! Huzzah!
But what’s this? It only seems to work off of a cold boot? Why would that be? Evidently the modem was going into a deep-sleep mode and windows wasn’t wanting to wake it back up, so a few AT commands later, it only knows “Awake” and “Off.”
Bandwidth really isn’t too bad considering it’s over LTE. It’s pretty awesome to not have to pull out my phone and tether constantly. Another fun little trick up that little machine’s sleeve!