Fibocom FM350-GL Support

I use AT+GTACT=? to select bands. Works well. Currently my router with the fm350 is at home so i cant copy paste the commands. But AT+GTACT=3,6,1,,101,103,107,501,5078,5079 ist what i use. You can look that up in the at command manual. 1,8... ist UMTS band, 101,103 ist LTE band and 501,5078,5079 ist NR band selection. Btw after each reboot, reset or poweroffreset the modem falls back to default ( all bands enabled again ).

The fm350gl i guess gets default CA policy. Default is eutran3+ngran78+eutran7+eutran1 in my case. My s23 gets eutran20 or eutran32 ( SDL ) additionaly. My guess is that the ISP has special profiles for the high end smartphones, so that they can CA some bands more. Tech wise the fm350gl should also have no problem adding another band. It could take in my case eutran3 another 10mhz, 8, 20, 32, but it does not. In that case my guess is that the enodeb/gnodeb does not allow more.

Nice result, I only get 250Mbit DL and 120 Mbit UL. Could you please paste the result of

AT+GTACT?

and

AT+GTCCINFO?

and

AT+GTCAINFO?

I have my bpi r4 at home, will take it with me tomorrow with the fm350 and do some tests and post it at a full site with all bands available.

At home i only have ngran1+eutran20/eutran8 or ngran28+eutran3+eutran1 from the other tower.

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I plan to place the module in that board and then connect it to an x86 Mini ITX router powered by OpenWrt or pfsense. I will connect the module in PCIE mode (as this is the recommended mode), but I feel I will still have to deal with this and many other issues. As long as they can be fixed with the right settings and the whole things can be automated through scripting I'm perfectly.
Do you feel to recommend a better setup? For board module I thought to a raspberry or alternatives multiple times, but it's much more expensive and to me seemed overkill for a module that basically needs no more than an adapter.
Well, a rasp could be a valid alternative to a Mini ITX router, but in this case I have the inverse feeling, not enough power (I plan to add a Mini PC NAS running jellyfin).

If I have understood well, even if module supports every possible LTE combination like I saw in the database, it doesn't mean I'm free to chose the one I want (in a way to include only the better ones), I still have to deal with what the ISP accepts. So, the Mhz range of the band I lose could be 10-20Mhz, depending from the combo accepted from the ISP.

Yes, tech wise the fm350gl should also have no problem adding another band, but from what I saw this has never been implemented. It's not just the bands of my tower, the module seems to only support 2NR+2LTE or 1NR+4LTE whatever the bands are despite their claim which at this point I should consider a false claim:


If you say that a particular combo must also be supported by the ISP through the right policy, I strongly suspect my ISP has such policy enabled:

You can see my ISP aggregating no more than 4 LTE with the same Mediatek chipset of FM350, but all 5 LTE bands aggregated with an SDX62 (=RM520). If these deductions are correct, than the fault is on the FM350 firmware where, unlike RM520N, full 5 bands aggregation has never been implemented.
Despite this, I still believe that one LTE band more does not justify the extra cost of an RM520N. I think that for people in the same situation like mine, the best choice is FM350 and then upgrade to x75 based modules when SA mode will be available (at that time their cost will probably much more affordable).

Very strange, you get nearly max speed in UL and such low speed in DL. May be just a coincidence and no relation at all, but on each speed test I saw with such UL speed, DL speed was always in 800-1000Mbit range. May I know what are your tower details and the bands you're trying to aggregate?

I would not use the kmod-mt7xx ( PCIE ), super buggy stick to usb for now. Tried it, its a mess laggs, ping spikes, looses the modem, if the modem crashes or you reboot it wont be discovered anymore etc.

MHI is in generell a bad option even with Kernel 6.6.

Fixes should come with 6.9 plus but we need to wait for next LTS kernel that will prob. come at the end of the year. Openwrt will then move the snap to that kernel in the beginning of the next year.

DL UL ration in 4G/5G networks are always that way. Atm you only have UL over the signaling cells. If you are lucky your ISP uses MIMO 2x2 UL. at german telekom the cap is 20mhz 2x2 UL --> 200mbit. you DL can be increased via CA. So if you only for example get a b3 cell you can accually have 100Mbit down and 200Mbit ( UL 4x4 ) up because the signaling cells DL spectrum is pretty busy with well... signaling xD

Ah an beside that, a fm350-gl costs 50€ and a rm520 is tripple or 5 times of that. Depends on the exact model you want.

The really cheap ones on ali are most of the time engineering samples so be careful. If you see a rm520 even the only pcie version under 100€ i would be careful.

This is not a good news at at all, but does this apply even to the linked board? It runs in driver free mode on its own without any kernel module handling on OpenWrt side.
I have read in multiple places that USB connection is slower (and I'm surprised you get 1.2Gbit).

Supposing that what you previously stated still applies in any case, then I can withstand a couple of months with such annoyances until Openwrt updates the kernel (same issues even with pfsense?).
Problem is that the board only supports Quectel chipsets in USB mode, so I can't just use temporarely USB and switch to PCIE once bugs are fixed.

Yes, I discussed about this here. Some variants of the engineering samples can be upgraded, but I live Europe and needs RM520N-EU which only seems to be available in release version.
So, for my specific case, no cheap RM520N option.
FM350-GL is a unique version and safe to buy in every place, right?

Thanks for explanation, although not now, I'm sure every word will make perfectly sense once I'll have the module on my hands and will see things running.

so I have a router with no official support (zbt z8102ax v2) and I need to compile everything myself.
Could someone please let me know what do I need to compile to have support for this fm350-gl device? (modemmanger or atc..whatever it works better)
thanks !

Is that router not a filogic arch? There is a image in the download section under snap for the zbt z8102ax.

OpenwrtDownloadPage -> snapshot -> mediatek -> filogic -> zbt z8102ax

Only for v1 - incompatibile with v2

klojsch, you or someone else, can you please tell me what kind of adapter you use?
I was going to buy this one recommended from many users (although I don't know for which module), but the seller said it only works for Qualcomm chipsets (and FM350 is Mediatek).

I have never tried the new releases adapter. But i've used this one and also this one with modules RM502Q-AE, RM520NGLAA, FM350GL, T99W175, Fibocom L850, Fibocom L860, T77W968 (DW5821e).

I plan to place the modem outdoor in the roof (or just the antennas if the loss is minimal). If I remember well, many time ago I talked with the seller about the first model you linked and he said usb is not recommended for outdoor use.
In theory, if I'm satisfied with just the antennas it should be fine, but this is something I can only discover when I will be on the field.

What are the differences between the two models you linked? I don't care about $10 difference and I just want the best of the twos. The cheaper one shows 1.22Gb/D and 630Mb/U. The other one less than 500Mb/D and 100Mb/U. How performed such boards with FM350 ?

I have read in multiple places that Pcie mode is faster and I still hope to not being forced to fallback into USB (I don't see good things when trying to connect the modem to the router via USB). In addition to that, the newer board is outdoor ready with its PoE port.
The seller proposed RM502Q and RM500Q as cheaper RM520N-EU alternatives that work with the new board, but I feel like I'm entering again into limited aggregation issues. How have been your experience with RM502Q-AE? This seems mainly for the US market and I suppose it's not a good starting point when it is going to be used in the Eu.

Don't know if it helps but AT+GTCCINFO shows me 2 cells, LTE (Band 103) and NR (Band 5078).

+GTCCINFO:
1,4,262,1,05D5,0019BF801,1300,358,103,100,13,60,60,22
1,9,,,FFFFFFF,00FFFFFFF,641760,940,5078,450,19,76,76,84

AT+GTCAINFO gives me 2 PCC: Band 5078, 90 MHz dl bandwidth, 2 dl mimo, 1 ul mimo, BPSK dl modulation, 64QAM ul modulation and Band 103, 20 MHz bandwidth, 2 dl mimo,1 ul mimo, QPSK dl modulation, 256QAM ul modulation.
at+gtcainfo?

+GTCAINFO:
PCC:5078,940,641760,450,2,1,1,3,19,-1,-80
+GTCAINFO:
PCC:103,358,1300,100,2,1,1,4                                                                                        
SCC 1:2,0,107,314,3050,100,255,2,255,2,255   
SCC 2:2,0,101,161,500,100,255,2,255,1,255
SCC 3:2,0,103,216,1444,50,255,4,255,3,255,13,-9,-81

I set band selection to automatic:

+GTACT: 20,6,6,1,2,4,5,8,101,102,103,104,105,107,108,112,113,114,117,118,119,120,125,126,128,129,130,134,138,139,140,141,142,143,146,148,166,171,501,502,503,505,507,508,5020,5025,5028,5030,5038,5040,5041,5048,5066,5071,5077,5078,5079

The only question now is how I can increase the download speed..

In case anyone needs to FCC unlock their Dell DW5931e / DW5931e-eSIM, I've found the vendor ID hash that will do that: 4909b5a4

I couldn't get the script with the 3df8c719 hash to work with my modem even after changing the hash, but when I execute the AT commands manually the same calculation with the 4909b5a4 hash does work and unlocks the modem for use.

For those who are curious, the vendor ID hashes can be generated with the following commands:

# Lenovo (and others?): 3df8c719
printf "%.8s" $(echo -n "KHOIHGIUCCHHII" | sha256sum | cut -d ' ' -f 1)

# Dell DW5931e / DW5931e-eSIM: 4909b5a4
printf "%.8s" $(echo -n "DW5931EFCCLOCK" | sha256sum | cut -d ' ' -f 1)
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hideyuki, do I need to add an USB to ethernet adapter in order to connect to an OpenWrt router? I suspect that it could not work directly via USB cable.

hi alb777, I suppose you are italian, can I contact you via PM in italian language? I have some question for a 5G module + router. thanks in avdance