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Hands On LTE on OpenWrt

Supported hardware

The supported LTE hardware in OpenWrt can be a minefield and my recommendation is to stick with those hardware that have been tested by the community and confirmed working.
In the past I tried to use a Huawei LTE USB stick.
They can be running in two modes.
- RNDIS https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/network/wan/wwan/ethernetoverusb_rndis
- NCM https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/network/wan/wwan/ethernetoverusb_ncm
The preferred mode is NCM but the with USB stick I had it was impossible to switch modes and I was stuck with RNDIS mode.
Another time I had a Mikrotik device with one of their LTE modems (pcie card). After many days and trying many things I eventually just gave up and replaced the card with another one that has proper OpenWrt support.
Some Access Points that comes with LTE modems included are well supported in OpenWrt.
- Cell-C / Belotech (https://openwrt.org/toh/cell_c/rtl30vw)
- GL.iNet GL-MiFi (https://openwrt.org/toh/gl.inet/gl-mifi)

To get the LTE modem working in OpenWrt you need to include some specific packages.
There are also some additional packages that you can include since they come in handy.