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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 optional packages that you can include since they come in handy.

opkg update
opkg install kmod-mii kmod-usb-net kmod-usb-wdm kmod-usb-net-qmi-wwan uqmi

For Serial Support (AT Commands)

opkg update
opkg install kmod-usb-serial-option kmod-usb-serial kmod-usb-serial-wwan

opkg update
opkg install picocom qmi-utils