I've recently upgraded the firmware in my iCON 7.2, which broke usb_modeswitch and PPP. Apparently it's not very efficient to have transfer speeds of up to 7.2Mb/s on a serial link, so the device manufacturer (Option) decided that a new kind of interface is needed. This new interface is a combination of a serial port for control, and a network interface for data transfer.
This also meant I had to install a new driver ("hso"), and while I was looking for that, I also found a new, better tool to switch the iCON from "fake CD-ROM" mode into UMTS modem mode. This tool (called rezero) doesn't seem to have the race conditions that the old tool had.
I've uploaded a package of the rezero utility to my PPA. It includes a udev script, so the tool gets run automatically as soon as you plug in an Option device that thinks it's a CD-ROM drive. More information about the PPA can be found on <a href="http://launchpad.