So I'm thinking a Raspberry Pi board would be perfect for what I want.

the Novatel USB760 drivers say noarch so they should work on the ARM board, right?

I think if I put it inline with a WRT54GL (free - I already have it) with Tomato or DD-WRT, I should pretty much be able to do whatever I want. All the Raspberry Pi would have to do is pass through the network connection to the LAN port.

I realize I could use the Pi as the router itself, but I'd like to keep the setup as simple as possible for the guy I'm training to run this here. Any thoughts or suggestions or see any problems with this idea?

I had a look at the .deb package for you. It contains i386 binaries for the USB serial drivers -- probably unmodified, so you can skip those files (with .ko extensions) and use the rest. "The rest" consists of configuration files to set up the Novatel CDMA board in udev, which should all be "noarch" stuff.

These wireless "modems" just appear as very fast serial ports when connected, and the software generally then uses PPP or something to set up a network connection over them.

Cheers

Raspberry pi has lots of stability issues with its USB, apparently the problems are with the SOC.....I suspect using a raspberry pi is going to cause you more headaches.

Adrian

Well, after months of just sharing the internet connection using the PC that the modem is plugged into, I finally bit the bullet and ordered a Raspberry Pi to try this out. I got an externally powered USB hub, so hopefully that will take care of the USB power issues. The modem draws 650ma max while transmitting, and I'm sure that the Rpi can't supply that without a Raspberry Pi Power Supply.

I may order one of those in the future simply to tidy up the installation, but for now, the USB hub was only $15.

As a status update, using the 3G modem with external antenna has worked so well, I've now got 4 of them setup here, and I was just contacted by someone on behalf of the village school to try to get a setup there. It's the only school in our district without internet. If the Rpi setup works nicely, I'll eventually do another one for the school.

A friend of mine has been struggling with a Raspberry Pi -- even just a USB Wifi adapter kills it for current draw. So he also has gone for a powered USB2 hub.

Cheers