It's been a few years since I used a mobile broadband dongle. My recollection is that getting it to work in Mandriva/Mageia was not easy. Recently I've had to test a ZTE MF730M from Three Network, in a Mageia 5 system.
I plugged it in and within seconds the net applet popup informed me that the network was up. No additional configuration was required. Interestingly, Mageia called it a "wired ethernet" connection.
Anyone having trouble finding a dongle that works OOB in Mageia might want to look at this one.
Jim