Best (cost effective) way to a 5G cellular openwrt wifi 6 router?

Hardware Questions and Recommendations
1

Hi there people,

I am wondering what is the smartest option to get a 5G celular connection, to wifi 6 openwrt router setup.

So far i have seen it done with:
-raspberri pi 4B + 5G Hat (with 5G modem m2 form factor) (waveshare 250$)

But i was wondering if it is possible with the:
-openwrt one ? As it has an m2 port on board ? Is this port usable for modem cards ?

if not is it possible to use:
-M2 5G modem usb dongle => the openwrt one board via USB ?

Or is it cheaper to hack another router device from another manufacturer and add the 5g usb dongle to that ?

Or could i use a router like this and replace their custom openwrt compiled firmware with the regular openwrt firmware and expect it to work ? (120$)

Thanks a lot for your advice, i am excited to start this project !
Have a great day guys and Many thanks for this beautful project.

2

Tether an old phone ?

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3

Hi there frollic, thanks for this proposal, I prefer to not use a phone for this solution.

4

Well, that was the (cheapest) way...

On to best?

5

Yeah i'm open to any setups out there ! super excited to start building something.

6

You kind of weren't :slight_smile:

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7

hahaha you got me there

8

Maybe the banana r4. But the be1400 card (wifi7) is still unstable. As you just want wifi6, you can use an older card with more stable drivers. It has a wwan m.2 slot and much more slots actually.

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9

Alright thanks for the tip Casulo, any example available out there you've heard of ?

10

I'm writing this reply behind a z8102ax (v2 unsupported officially but I have a working patch) that was around 90$ on aliexpress + 40$ fm350gl m2 5G card.
If you prefer a "tinkerless" solution there's the arcadyan aw1000 for around 150$ shipped on the same aliexpress.

11

Hey Maurer, Thanks for the reply, are these solutions capable of running adguard and a wireguard vpn profile as usual on openwrt ?

12

Both capable from cpu and ram but for adguard afaik you need external storage and the aw1000 is better suited as it has an external usb port. For z8102ax you need to plug a cheap m2 ssd (4-5$ on ali) in the second modem port (yes you can have 2 modems in this device if needed)

13

Then there's the ZTE F50 external 5G modem.

14

That's 100$+ on a simple search,. Adding decent wifi6 will cost you at least 50$ more, right?

15

Technically, it's a mifi device, so you don't need any additional hw, but then there's no Openwrt.

16

Alright thanks guys, your help is much appreciated

17

what do you mean with v2 here ? and i've come across the arcadyan aw1000, and found the one i posted up top here, they advertise it as the follow up for the arcadyan :

Screenshot 2025-02-16 at 16.51.31
Screenshot 2025-02-16 at 16.51.31989×364 67.4 KB

What do you think of that one? Its a little cheaper, and they say the hardware is a not as strong, but state it shouldn't be any problem. In your opinion, is it worth trying ? Will it still deliver the adguard and wireguard functionality in a usable way with this lowered specs ? Wifi is supposed to be a bit faster though.

18

well z8102AXv2 is not supported in openwrt but only in forks like ofmodemsandmen (see here ) and if you don't want to mess with custom patches just get the aw1000 - no ideaa what the other one is but most likely is not supported by official openwrt that we're recommending here

19

Ok, thanks again. In between the z8102AXv2 and aw1000, (i can see both of them have a usb port leading to the outside of the case? Is the one on the z8102AXv2, only for power ?) why did you choose the z8102AXv2 instead of the aw1000 ? also, can't find the v2 version on ali. Do you have a link perhaps ? i'm only finding this one: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005008318935226.html?spm=a2g0o.productlist.main.5.6e53618aZvgPMh&algo_pvid=92ec8c3f-93c9-45d2-98e4-95bdfc5d1bdb&algo_exp_id=92ec8c3f-93c9-45d2-98e4-95bdfc5d1bdb-2&pdp_ext_f=%7B%22order%22%3A%22-1%22%2C%22eval%22%3A%221%22%7D&pdp_npi=4%40dis%21THB%213439.97%213439.97%21%21%21722.00%21722.00%21%40212e532617397011176174357e600c%2112000044593262664%21sea%21TH%214572234713%21X&curPageLogUid=5evOSezpjvLP&utparam-url=scene%3Asearch%7Cquery_from%3A

20

I've chose z8102ax over aw1000 as I already had the fm350gl modem from a previous project.
Here is the v2

And as you see there is no external usb. It has 2 internal m2 modem slots.
An internal photo is here Adding OpenWrt support for ZBT Z8102AX - #13 by davidair

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