After some googling, I settled on this tutorial from ASE Labs. It almost worked. After freezing the laptop, forcing a hard reboot, editing some config files and then running a shell command, my modem worked. Once. This was exactly the experience I was expecting.

Feeling a bit of despair, I tried plan B: right click the Network Manager that sits on the Gnome panel. Hot damn. There’s a wizard for this. The functionality is built right in. So consider this post less of a tutorial and more of an informational post. I just want to tip off the next googler that they don’t have to perform any incantations to get this working.

You need to know this:
username: <yourphonenumber>@vzw3g.com (i.e. 4155551212@vzw3g.com)
password: vzw

Now right click Network manager followed by Edit connections -> Mobile broadband -> Add.

There’s very brief official documentation. The key thing to know is that Ubuntu calls this feature “mobile broadband.” Basically, the only problem with this feature is that it’s not SEO optimized for what I think it should be called.
https://help.ubuntu.com/9.04/internet/C/connecting-mobile.html

If you want to get really tricky you can even configure your laptop to act as a wireless router so that you can share your internet with people around you.
http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/…