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[Alex Atkin UK]

Was curious about this router as I hate the locked-down Huawei CPE Pro 2 and liked the idea of moving onto something based on OpenWRT.  It had also been refusing to let me login to the WebUI from Firefox which was frustrating as I have to login to get the 2FA SMS every time I want to login to SMARTY.

Seen a few reviews saying its good, and some people saying it plain didn't work.  Figured I would give it a go anyway.  Initial impressions are promising.

Upload is oddly low, as if the Huawei was using 5G and this one is using 4G.  But I primarily use 5G as a little extra download bandwidth for Steam downloads and here its quite the score.

The 2.5G WAN port can be switched into being the LAN port (I'd certainly hope so being based on OpenWRT), which of course I did to get the most out of it.



The Huawei had lately been struggling to get over 600Mbit for some reason, though it used to hit about 930Mbit (limited by its Gigabit port).  So this is quite a nice improvement if it pans out over time.

Very confused about the dl_bandwidth / ul_bandwidth values as they clearly are not accurate, but the fact it gives a clear rating on the signals is a huge improvement over the Huawei.

Now I just need to figure out if I can add custom scripts (doesn't seem to be shown on the WebUI but I'd expect the functionality from the core OpenWRT to still be present, SSH is active and functional) and what commands I need to extract information.  Would like to be able to forward SMS to my home server and view the signal information from my central monitoring page.

Lots of storage:

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Filesystem                Size      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/root                54.5M     54.5M         0 100% /rom
tmpfs                   240.2M    468.0K    239.7M   0% /tmp
/dev/mmcblk0p8            7.2G    414.9M      6.8G   6% /overlay
overlayfs:/overlay        7.2G    414.9M      6.8G   6% /
tmpfs                   512.0K         0    512.0K   0% /dev

It seems opkg is present and configured - interesting.

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Downloading https://fw.gl-inet.com/releases/v21.02.3/kmod-4.4/aarch64_cortex-a53/mediatek/x3000/Packages.gz
Updated list of available packages in /var/opkg-lists/glinet_core
Downloading https://fw.gl-inet.com/releases/v21.02.3/packages-4.4/aarch64_cortex-a53/glinet/Packages.gz
Updated list of available packages in /var/opkg-lists/glinet_gli_pub
Downloading https://fw.gl-inet.com/releases/v21.02.3/packages-4.0/aarch64_cortex-a53/packages/Packages.gz
Updated list of available packages in /var/opkg-lists/glinet_gli_packages

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Installing iperf3 (3.10.1-1) to root...
Downloading https://fw.gl-inet.com/releases/v21.02.3/packages-4.0/aarch64_cortex-a53/packages/iperf3_3.10.1-1_aarch64_cortex-a53.ipk
Configuring iperf3.
Updating database.
Database update completed.
Apparently this is also available under Applications > Plugins in the UI.

I was surprised to find under System > Advanced they have the full stock OpenWRT LuCI UI too.  What a really neat implementation.

Just beat my fastest ever load-balanced speed (5G + FTTP):

[meritez]

Beautiful router,
Latest modem firmware is over here:
https://github.com/4IceG/RM520N-GL

Beautiful router, latest modem makes a huge difference.

[Alex Atkin UK]

Beautiful router,
Latest modem firmware is over here:
https://github.com/4IceG/RM520N-GL

Beautiful router, latest modem makes a huge difference.

It looks like the manufacturer does NOT provide qfirehose in their repo.  I don't want to put stock OpenWRT on it as from what I have read its not exactly optimised for this device.

The only negative I've found so far of the manufacturer firmware is it doesn't present Access Point client stats other than the MAC address of the client.  This isn't just missing from their UI, LuCI and "iwinfo rax0 assoclist" doesn't show it either.

[Dwight]

Hi Alex.
Seen a number of these GL.iNet units on YouTube.
They've been getting very good reviews.
This unit ticks an awful lot of boxes for your setup.
Regards.
Dwight.

[meritez]

It looks like the manufacturer does NOT provide qfirehose in their repo.  I don't want to put stock OpenWRT on it as from what I have read its not exactly optimised for this device.

The only negative I've found so far of the manufacturer firmware is it doesn't present Access Point client stats other than the MAC address of the client.  This isn't just missing from their UI, LuCI and "iwinfo rax0 assoclist" doesn't show it either.

QFirehose is included in the zip file on the gl.inet website:
https://forum.gl-inet.com/t/constantly-loosing-cellular-connection-on-spitz-x3000/40793/79?

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Enter the background of the router and run the following command

cd /
mkdir firmware
cd firmware
wget http://download.gl-inet.com/download/RM520GL-modem_firmware/RM520NGLAAR03A03M4G_01.201.01.201.zip 8
unzip RM520NGLAAR03A03M4G_01.201.01.201.zip -d RM520NGLAAR03A03M4G_01.201.01.201
QFirehose -f RM520NGLAAR03A03M4G_01.201.01.201
reboot
Clients depends on your devices, iOS devices are notorious for false mac addresses and cannot be identified.

[Alex Atkin UK]

It seems QFirehose is included in the router firmware itself, makes sense.  It flashed fine following those instructions, thanks.

Unfortunately the new function that lets it read the APN from the network seems to be working, its now ignoring my choice of APN.

By client stats I was referring to signal strength, link rate, etc.

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E2:01:BC:  unknown / unknown (SNR 0)  0 ms ago
        RX: unknown                                        0 Pkts.
        TX: unknown                                        0 Pkts.
        expected throughput: unknown

When it should report something like:

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60:B7:6E:  -61 dBm / -92 dBm (SNR 31)  25870 ms ago
        RX: 6.0 MBit/s                                362197 Pkts.
        TX: 702.0 MBit/s, VHT-MCS 8, 80MHz, VHT-NSS 2    455716 Pkts.
        expected throughput: 389.6 MBit/s

For example with a simple cgi script I can pull from my NanoHD running OpenWRT.

[Alex Atkin UK]

Very confused about the dl_bandwidth / ul_bandwidth values as they clearly are not accurate, but the fact it gives a clear rating on the signals is a huge improvement over the Huawei.

Doh, this was obvious - its channel width so quite literally the band width!