Inside USB 3G module

After some cleaning up I found an old USB 3G net stick that I got for some reason but never used. Just lately I upgraded to LTE equipment so this specific stick is completely useless for me now.
(and over just last two weekend I used some 26GB of data (most being TV streaming on laptop while away from home ) according to counter on top of device - and by the way, it costs me 15€ a month total, no data caps at all).

Out of curiosity I decided to tear that open before throwing it away, although I had pretty good idea what would be inside. After all, I had some time while waiting for my new purchase to work its magic...

...but more about that toy later.

Outside it's ... well, a stick. Stupidly long though so you have to be somewhat careful if you're using it with laptop on your lap.

Some gentle persuasion...

...and after opening two covered screws next to USB connector it was open. Approximately as I expected so far. Note two antennas, one at the end of stick and other on the cover as simple piece of metal. White piece of plastic is light guide for LEDs that can be seen just above small chip outside metal shield.

Other side after taking the metal shields off. Here we have Qualcomm RTR6285 - GSM/WCDMA transceiver chip and Qualcomm PM6658 of which I couldn't find any usable information about (and yes, SIM/MicroSD holder too, stick works as USB storage too if you have SD card in it)

Other side again. Qualcomm MSM6246 - 3G HSDPA chipset (and most likely application processor too) and Samsung K5D1258DCB chip - again I couldn't quickly find any reliable information but it seems to be a Flash chip. There was a strip of metal over MSM chip but I cut it and bent it away to see markings as you can see in the image.

Left side is dedicated to RF; Avago FEM-7780 (UMTS front-end), Avago ACPM-7371 (UMTS 4x4 power amp for 900MHz) and RF3161 (GSM/EDGE amplifier). There were some other chips too but their markings didn't exactly fill me with confidence that I'd find anything relevant so I didn't even bother trying.

So there, as expected it's made of mostly off-the-shelf parts, probably closely duplicating some reference design directly available from Qualcomm (well, directly available -- after you have convinced them that they should and would want to do business with you and signing a full cabinet's worth of contracts, NDAs and other paperwork.)