Comment 296 for bug 446146

@jameschuk8 - The E220 has a different bug which is fixed for most people by updating the modem's firmware. See bug #449394.

Regarding your final question - if you are referring to the opening comment "Fix: Change to USB storage, which lets the device fallback to a shorter sense format. This patch went into 2.6.31.5 ("usb-storage: Workaround devices with bogus sense size").", here are the details from the 2.6.31.5 kernel changelog for that patch:

commit 670add0a279e39e13a66876389c64d4f7dcf0379
Author: Benjamin Herrenschmidt <benh at kernel.crashing.org>
Date: Tue Oct 13 15:53:47 2009 +1100

    usb-storage: Workaround devices with bogus sense size

    commit b8430e1b82b7e514d76a88eb70a7d8831d50df1e upstream.

    usb-storage: Workaround devices with bogus sense size

    Some devices, such as Huawei E169, advertise more than the standard
    amount of sense data, causing us to set US_FL_SANE_SENSE, assuming
    they support it. However, they subsequently fail the request sense
    with that size.

    This works around it generically. When a sense request fails due to
    a device returning an error, US_FL_SANE_SENSE was set, and that sense
    request used a larger sense size, we retry with a smaller size before
    giving up.

    Based on an original patch by Ben Efros <ben at pc-doctor.com>

    Signed-off-by: Benjamin Herrenschmidt <benh at kernel.crashing.org>
    Acked-by: Alan Stern <stern at rowland.harvard.edu>
    Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh at suse.de>