ZTE MF279T Cellular wireless home gateway

Hardware Questions and Recommendations
1

I found this at a thrift store. In the box was Telus specific documentation so I suspect its locked to them in some way. It has a 3000mAh battery. looks like a USB port. Only a single LAN port while the manufacturers site claims 2.

From the manufacturers site:

Dimensions
Size: 160 x 160 x 33 mm
Weight: 450g approx.
Display
6 LED indicators
Power, Voicemail, Wifi, Information, Battery, Signal bar
Functions
VoLTE
Voice
FOTA
Battery (optional)
3000mAh Removable
Memory
ROM: 512MB
RAM: 256MB
Platform
MDM9250-3 + QCA9563
Operating System
Linux
Connectivity
UMTS bands B2/4/5
LTE bands 2/4/5/12/(MFBI)/13/30/7/26
Carrier Aggregation 7A, 4A-12A, 7A-7A (non-contiguous)
Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n/ac 2.4GHz & 5GHz
RJ11 Telephone Ports: 2
RJ45 Ethernet Ports: 2 Gigabit Ethernet

I opened it and found a UART and hooked up to it.

after boot I am dropped at a root console.
I see there exists files /etc/openwrt_version and /etc/openwrt_release

Nexi Ill try and get into the bootloader see if i can dump the firmware ?

2

This device is near identical to existing openwrt device ZTE MF281
Using the UART I could access uboot to boot the openwrt initramfs over tftp, investigate, then scp over the factory file to install with mtd write.
The only difference I can see so far is the MF279T doesnt have a switch, so ethernet doesnt come up correctly.
There is also only about 12MB of free space for packages. That seems low,

3

Please share the stock firmware dump and the device tree from stock firmare (/sys/firmware/fdt) - it may help to bring the support.

12MB of storage is due to decision to keep the UBI volume within stock firmware partition and keep the other partitions, unlike I did for MF286 - but this way, installation is possibly easier.