Huawei E3372 with OpenWRT#

Sat, 12 Nov 2016 22:25:34 +0000

I've just moved house. The new house has no broadband or even phone line, and when I last asked about the progress of getting a line connected I was told that "Your order is currently in the newsites stage and the offsite ducting has started" and it was going to take most of a month before I could even start ordering broadband.

Which means I need mobile broadband stuff. I looked on Ebay for USB LTE sticks, and I looked on comparison sites for cheap data SIM-only deals, and ended up with a Huawei E3372h. To make this work with OpenWRT took a couple of evenings swearing at it, so here's the end result: note that all of these things were for me sufficient but may not be to you necessary.

• I flashed the current OpenWRT snapshot for my device (TP-Link TL-WR842ND, an ar71xx variant). (Quite likely the latest release version would do just as well, but this was part of aimless "why does it not work" casting around, and I can't be bothered to downgrade it now)

• I installed these packages:

chat
comgt
comgt-ncm
dhcpcd
kernel
kmod-mii
kmod-usb-net
kmod-usb-net-cdc-ether
kmod-usb-net-cdc-ncm
kmod-usb-net-cdc-subset
kmod-usb-net-huawei-cdc-ncm
kmod-usb-serial
kmod-usb-serial-option
kmod-usb-serial-wwan
kmod-usb-wdm
libpthread
librt
libusb-1.0
libusb-compat
usb-modeswitch
usbutils
wwan
zlib

• I amended the 'WAN' clause in `/etc/config/network` to look like the following:

config interface 'WAN'
        option proto 'ncm'
        option apn 'everywhere'
        option ifname 'wwan0'
        option pdptype 'IP'
        option device '/dev/ttyUSB0'
        option delay 15

• I tried a whole load of other stuff but it was all dead ends. In particular, there was no need to do anything with reflashing the stick to different firmware versions or Web UI versions, and there was no need to mess around with manual usb_modeswitch stuff: there is a mode switch involved but OpenWRT already knows how to do it

I get about 12-17Mb/s (over wireless, sitting next to the router) according to fast.com which is not superfast considering the hardware is supposed to be capable of 150Mb/s and the package I'm paying for is "up to 60Mb/s". There may still be something I'm missing in the configuration. Whether I spend much more time looking at it is going to depend mostly on how much faff it takes to get proper broadband installed. It might be a while