Disable ATT Communications Manager (ATTCM) autostart on MAC OSX

ATTCM can be a nuisance and there is hardly much you can do on MAC OSX since there is no startup elements you can disable like on Windows. You can go to System Preferences > Users & Groups > Login Items and can disable some items but it doesn't work with USB Modems. Once you have installed the ATTCM or any USB modem application (like sierra wireless air watcher), you are kind of stuck with the autostart of these applications once you insert the modem on the USB port since they almost act like a disk.

So what i had to do was to first of all setup PPP connection via the USB Modem network interface as detailed in one of my previous posts so that i could at-least connect to the internet. Don't try to upgrade the ATTCM with the application running because you don't know where the update is going to get downloaded and 99% of the times it doesn't come with the uninstall option and no modem driver for some wired reason.

If you are really interested, go to ATT website and download the dog file and install it manually so that at least you get the uninstall option which cleanly uninstalls the ATTCM.

I would rather stick to the ATTCM 7.2 version since it comes with correct modem drivers for SierraWireless 313U (Momentum 4G) wireless data card so that you can have the PPP working properly which is essential if you want to try VPN via data card.

So in order to disable the autostart, i ended up doing the following:

1. Unplug the USB data card before doing this.
2. Go to the Finder > Applications > AT&T > AT&T Communication Manager.app > Right Click > Show Package Contents
3. Click on Contents 
• Delete diskutil
• Click on SharedSupport > Config
• Delete the autostart INI file.
• Click on MacOS and delete the following files
• attcm
• Don't delete the attcm_AppStart.app

Shutdown and restart MAC without the modem plugged in. Once started, connect the modem and use the PPP connection to connect to the internet. You can also setup the PPP advanced options to auto connect to avoid the extra step of manually clicking connect on the PPP connection. Also you can create a shortcut by checking "show modem in status bar".