OpenWRT support for 5G routers is severely lacking. The only modern devices that I found are the GL.iNet GL-X3000, the Arcadyan AW1000 and maybe the ZBT Z800AX. All of the router brands that I can actually buy locally without resorting to shady AliExpress offers, such as ZTE, Xiaomi, AVM or TP-Link, are currently not supported.
What's most peculiar is that nobody on this forum is talking about the sorry state of 5G router support.
5G internet has exploded in Europe. I got a 5G unlimited data plan with 500 Mbit/s for 16 EUR per month. Everyone is now trying to sell their old 4G/LTE routers. But maybe 5G internet is not popular in the US?
My current plan is to buy some cheap ZTE router and wait until GL.iNet reveal their next generation 5G router, which will hopefully again come with OpenWRT support.
Zyxel NR7101 works fairly well. But I agree that the interest and support for this mode is lacklustre.
OpenWrt is worth persevering with for 4G/5G though. For example, cake-autorate - developed in OpenWrt - enables the application of cake to this variable bandwidth case, and it works well.
And I’m affraid, that this doesn’t changes in near future.
The NR7101 was my favorite but is not so easy to get for a realistic price. So I ended up with the NR7302 (D-Telekom branded). But I’m really missing a possible OpenWRT support. The original FW is buggy and not supported by Zyxel.
Here in Portugal you can get a real unlimitted 5G Sim from €5-7/month from Digi.pt. 5G-net is poor and working only in bigger citys and I don’t know if there is 5G SA, but for this price a no brainer if you can’t get any fibre access.
I’m living on country side and have with the outdoor modem and this provider a 4G 100/50Mb/s connection. I’m very lucky and get most of the times the maximum speed. The minimum until now was about 30/25. Much faster then ADSL (10/0.5) and 8 times cheaper.
The point is the antenna. These low price carriers do have only frequencies with low strength of signal.
With a usb dongle inside the house I do have problems to get a constant and “fast” connection. The outside modem solves this handycap. It is even better than my mobile phone.
There could be used external antennas with coaxial cables as well, but they would cost even more.
btw:
Do you know any cheap 5G modules on pcie/usb? I think they cost all about €200-250+.
Depends what you are looking for, if it’s just cheap and speedy, an old 5g mobile phone plugged into either a usb, or wan port with a usb to Ethernet adaptor (powered) works like a charm, just make sure the phone port is usb 3. Definite downsides like multi NAT, and the phone picking it’s own subnet can clash, and Ethernet sharing turning off if the usb power goes off, and not auto turning back on unless you root, or can think of a different way (e.g usb power is on a 10 hour UPS so it is unlikely to ever turn off)
These two models are perfect examples of two very different 5G router designs. I believe it’s important to understand the difference when discussing this topic. Adding support for the NR7101 was easy. The NR7302 will most likely never be supported. There is a reason for this.
The NR7101 is based around a very common and generic wifi SoC with good OpenWrt support - Mediatek MT7621, but the exact one is not important. This SoC is connected to a 5G modem via USB. The connection is fixed in this case, using a soldered modem module. But that’s not important either. It could also have been a module in a mini-PCIe or m.2 socket. The modem module runs its own firmware and communicates with a USB device driver running on the host SoC. All we need to support the modem is the USB driver and some userspace application like uqmi or umbim. All the low level radio network stuff is handled by the modem vendor firmware running on the modem module. The modem module is actually a complete Linux system, running on its own rather powerful SoC with plenty of RAM and flash. But we don’t run OpenWrt on it. It’s running vendor firmware.
Note that USB is not the only possibilty here. We also have drivers supporting some PCIe connected modem modules. And other buses is also possible in theory. The point is the dedicated modem SoC running a vendor firmware.
The problem with the above design should be obvious from a vendor point of view: Why have a complex design with two SoCs running requiring two firmware images? That’s doubling both the hardware and software cost. Why not simply connect an ethernet phy to the modem module and be done with it? And that’s exactly what they did with the NR7302. And what most other vendors do now.
Coming back to OpenWrt support, this means that we need to run OpenWrt on the modem SoC to support 5G routers like the NR7302. It also means that OpenWrt has to implement all the radio network support that we left for the vendor firmware previously. Most of this is usually offloaded to dedicated signal processing cores in the modem SoC, running vendor binary blobs in any case, so it’s not impossible. But it does end up with lots of proporietary and undocumented interfaces. Supporting enough to have it running like the vendor firmware is a major task.
There are people trying to do something like that and having success:
We need that work brought to more modern 5G SoCs to support current and relatively cheap 5G routers, like the NR7302. This is so much work that I don’t see it as realistic at all. But I am often wrong
The more realistic alternatives, IMHO, are already presented in this thread:
NR7101 or similar older designs, or
mini-PCIe or m.2 modem modules running vendor firmware, connected to OpenWrt supported boards with the appropriate slot, or
USB stick modems running vendor firmware, connected to any OpenWrt device with a USB port
These solutions are more expensive, and do not even necessarily perform as well as the newer 5G devices, so I absolutely understand the question in the topic. I just don’t want anyone to falsely believe this is going to happen any time soon.
(this might be shocking and off topic, but maybe consider just running vendor firmware in bridge mode on the 5G router and have another OpenWrt router behind it? It’s not significantly different from using a device like the NR7101, only replacing the internal USB connection with an external ethernet cable)
The later designs are more complete android smartphones without a display (but OpenWrt is not designed for smartphones, android and similar), than classical routers with addon modems - and that means they are often running a rather different android kernel and software environment. Finding suitable middle ground will require massive amounts of development, writing drivers for hardware that is tightly guarded by the vendors (regulatory compliance!) and in many cases lineageos might be easier than OpenWrt for the SOCs/ hardware involved.
It is indeed extremely non-optimal, but it’s been 100% reliable for the last 2 years, it’s cheap, and it’s extremely simple to set up for Neanderthals like me. Unlike the 5g modem hat I tried first, it crashed under load requiring a reboot, often, and it was comparatively slow, barely achieving 1/2 of the speed of the same SIM in a phone, even with the help of the kind people here helping me with the correct incantations. I think I’m just bitter
