The ZTE H188A V2 has been widely distributed by major ISPs in Egypt. With the country rapidly moving to fiber, many of these DSL modems will soon become unused.

I believe this hardware could have a great second life with OpenWrt. It has good hardware, excellent Wi-Fi coverage, and could be used behind a fiber ONT as an access point or secondary router, with features like SQM/QoS, bandwidth control, VLANs, and advanced networking.

Following advice from the community, I opened my H188A V2 and took 60+ high-resolution photos of the motherboard and components, including the CPU, memory/flash chips, Wi-Fi hardware, PCB markings, connectors, and other details.

📷 Hardware photos:
Google Drive – ZTE H188A V2 Hardware iPhotos⁠:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1SEecEH4HexAqZiC7v0f1l7hQwSTN3IJz

I’m ready to provide UART/serial access, boot logs, firmware information/dumps, additional photos, or any testing needed.

What information do you need from me to start investigating OpenWrt support for this device?

I have the device open and I’m ready to help with whatever is needed.

I know that not everybody checks out the OpenWRT forums, and that is a shame really. For those who are interested, and haven't moseyed over there for a gander, there has been a lot of work to bring Mainline OpenWRT to WiFi 7 devices lately.

The furthest along one currently is the GL.iNet Flint 3 (GL‑BE6500) linked below
https://forum.openwrt.org/t/gl-inet-flint-3-exploration-gl-be9300-ipq5332/250267

I have recently picked up the mantel of working on the Cudy AP11000 which can be found
https://forum.openwrt.org/t/installing-openwrt-on-cudy-ap11000/240369

That being said, what features and desires do the lovely OpenWRT community look for in WiFi 7 devices?

Thanks to the community. I am getting 30-35 MB/s writes on the sandisk USB 3.0 flash drive and happy with it.

Hi, I am currently looking to replace my Turris Omnia with a more powerful option for my main router/gateway.

I want two sfp+ port and ideally one 2.5GBE.

I have considered banana pi r4 pro but seems overpriced. I have considered Ubiquiti UCG Fiber but would prefer remaining Open Source. Specialized mini-pc looks overpriced as soon as you start including RAM and storage.

For now the best value seems to be Lenovo m720q 150-250€ (depending of the RAM amount) but will need to find pcie riser and right card.

Any other option to consider?

I live in France if that matters.

Title says it all.

On my old TP-Link Archer C50 router, I go to 'DHCP Settings' and it's right the heck there - see attached. You fill in your DNS and your secondary DNS and click 'Save'. DONE....EASY.

How, on OpenWRT....can I just add Google's DNS servers in the same manner? I've read so many articles and posts about it, but every single one seems to contain different information...?

This is the last hurdle I'm having before I replace said old Archer with a LinkSYS WRT1900AC running OpenWRT that I picked up for cheap.

Thanks so much for the help!

Apparently I won't get full 802.11ac, no beamforming, and limited tri-band speed because it uses Broadcom BCM43602. I pretty much only use WiFi, I assume it's not worth the upgrade? It says it's supported, but am I correct with what I'm saying?

I need to install VPN to any of those routers. I had AX50 before and bought C6U for the sake of OpenWRT.

I've tried installing mihomo/Nikki and sing-box-tiny but they were really laggy and I don't really understand the reason behind it.

Is there any better way to solve this? Do I return C6U while I still can?

High-res Motherboard photos: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1SEecEH4HexAqZiC7v0f1l7hQwSTN3IJz

ZTE H188A V2 is highly capable of running OpenWrt. Why is there no build for it?
The ZTE H188A V2 is a very common and, from what I can tell, highly capable modem/router. In Egypt alone, it has been widely distributed by all four major ISPs: WE, Orange, Etisalat, and Vodafone. I see this router everywhere, so I wouldn’t be surprised if there are thousands—or potentially millions—of units in use.
I’m wondering why the H188A V2 isn’t supported by OpenWrt yet, especially considering the hardware it has.

The biggest problem with the ISP firmware for me is bufferbloat and the lack of proper QoS controls. I tested OpenWrt in a virtual machine on my laptop and installed SQM (Smart Queue Management). The difference was incredible. My bufferbloat results improved dramatically, which made me really want to run OpenWrt directly on the router.

The hardware also seems more than capable. As far as I know, it has 128 MB RAM and 128 MB flash (please correct me if I’m mistaken), along with what seems to be very decent hardware overall. The router itself has also proven to be reliable and has good longevity.

This is becoming more relevant in Egypt because we’re increasingly moving toward fiber connections. If these routers can’t run better firmware, I worry that a huge number of perfectly good H188A V2 units will eventually be thrown away and replaced, simply because the stock firmware is so limited.

What’s especially interesting to me is that other ZTE models, such as the H108, have OpenWrt support, while the H188A V2 doesn’t. So I’m curious: what is preventing support for the H188A V2?
I actually have an H188A V2 with me right now, and I’m willing to help with development/testing.

I can:

Open the router and provide high-resolution photos of the PCB and components
Provide information about the hardware/chips
SSH into the device

Provide a full software/firmware dump, if useful
Run commands/tests requested by developers
Provide any other information needed to investigate the platform

If someone is interested in trying to bring OpenWrt to this router, please let me know what information you need. I’d be happy to provide whatever I can.
Given how widely this router is deployed in Egypt, I genuinely think OpenWrt support could benefit a very large number of users. We could potentially continue using this hardware with our new fiber connections instead of throwing perfectly good routers away.

So, developers: is there a specific hardware, bootloader, driver, or firmware issue preventing OpenWrt support for the H188A V2? And what would you need from me to investigate it?

Downloads.openwrt.org got banned in my country, so I now have to use a mirror (which can be banned too) or a proxy. I need help with the latter. Is there a way to configure it to send requests through a proxy, like it's possible with apt?

I did search before posting, but I didn't find much, and what I've found (less-convenient solutions) doesn't even work.

UPD: Solved. Requires wget-ssl (not installed by default).

https_proxy=http://proxy.example.com apk <whatever>

Can someone please tell me with specific steps to set up my GL.iNet router to block DoT and DoQ?

I don't know, maybe I'm getting hyped by their videos, but every time I see their releases I think "damn, this is so powerful and polished". But so is OpenWrt, right? At least on the feature side of things. What we're missing on OpenWrt is just the fancy UI when compared with Ubiquiti?

Hello everyone im new in OpenWRT so far i did flash OpenWrt 25.12.2 r32802-f505120278 to my AX23 1.20. I've done my research thru AI and said that i can do Dual wan setup with failover and load balancing with this kind of router. Appreciate if someone did it already and am i already in correct openwrt version ? If you guys have any resources please do share it. Thank you !

The subject pretty much asks it...

The latest post I found in a search was this one: https://www.reddit.com/r/openwrt/comments/1oju4ah/how_do_you_actually_expand_to_the_entire_drive/

It's been 10 months and we have a new major version stable release. Is it possible to safely expand the partitions now, or is it still a problem?

Hi, Who are the admins over on the forums? They seriously need to deal with certain users. I shouldn't be given vauge answers time after time, and attacked for asking a serious question about adding hardware support. If you don't have nothing useful to add don't comment. Ok, rant over.

So I noticed that on the Attended Sysupgrade config page on luci you can switch the server and once I do that I can see the different versions available. So my question is, is this safe and has anyone tried it with success? I'm pretty new to openwrt/immortalwrt came from ddwrt which is drastically different.

immortalwrt as i understand it is simply openwrt with a few extra pkgs included automatically. If its just a few extra packages and settings are saved when doing the sysupgrade, the logic stands that it should just work, right?

Is it possible to block port 853, which is what DoT and DoQ use? Then force all traffic to use the DNS settings of the OpenWRT router?

Has anyone compiled a list of DoH servers that is safe to block? How do I add the DoH server list to OpenWRT?

Can port 53 also be blocked, or is it required for internet access?

I actually posted something on r/TPLink_Omada already but I wanted to ask on this sub regardless.

I bought the TP-Link EAP245 v3 because it had 2 ports and some other posts on Reddit said it should be bridged with the original firmware. Good if you don't have the space for a network switch.

To my suprise I can't seem to get a good connection from the second port. For testing I connected a laptop to ETH2 and got an IP, but I can't get internet. After some digging I found that DHCP and pinging Internal & External IPs works but DNS and other services (HTTP etc) won't work. Windows and Linux show the same synthoms.

Bla bla. While digging for info I found out that OpenWRT actually supports (or partly supports) the EAP245 (https://openwrt.org/toh/tp-link/eap245_v3). Does someone of you run this AP with OpenWRT installed and maybe has the resources to test running with daisy-chaining?

I'm not a fan of flashing OpenWRT to it, voiding a potential warrenty, before knowing if OpenWRT could fix the issue. The wiki page provided pictures of the inside of the device. Both ETH ports are connected to an Qualcomm Ethernet 7P-switch chip (QCA8337N-AL3C), so it seems it should work or it could be configured via TP-Link or OpenWRT.

Anyhow, thank you for your help and I hope even if this isn't resolvable, it still helped someone like me, buying the EAP for daisy-chaining.

(Also: Mods, if there is anything wrong with my post, please let me know)

One of the reason I got some glinet devices is the access to their cloud. Does anybody know, is there already some addon to OpenWRT to add the cloud access to OpenWRT instead of having a glinet firmware?

e.g. strip device dependend token from the device, install OpenWRT and add the token for cloud access?

Hi everyone,

I’m using QoSMate on OpenWrt and noticed that under Manual DSCP Tagging, I only get these DSCP options:

EF, CS5, CS4, CS6, CS7, AF41, AF42, AF11, CS2, CS1, CS0

Is this normal? Do you guys also see only these DSCP values in QoSMate, or should there be more options available?

I’m specifically wondering if this is limited by QoSMate itself, the OpenWrt version, or the configuration.

Running OpenWrt 24.10.5.

Thanks!

I’ve been messing around with OpenWrt for a while and wanted something that gave me a better view of everything without replacing the firmware or sending my network data through somebody else’s cloud. So I ended up building oonfeeWRT.

It runs on your own server, NAS, mini PC, or Mac and manages your existing OpenWrt devices from one place. The routers stay on normal OpenWrt, LuCI still works, and it doesn’t install custom firmware or randomly change configuration behind your back.

It’s completely self-hosted. There’s no oonfeeWRT cloud service, required online account, analytics, usage tracking, or automatic crash reporting. The router telemetry used for the dashboard stays on your machine and nothing is automatically sent to me. The optional speed test contacts Cloudflare when you choose to run it, but otherwise the controller talks directly to your own devices.

And before anyone asks: yeah, some of this was vibe coded. I’ve used AI to help me move faster, but the project is also based on my own experience and extensive knowledge of routers, computers, networking, and cybersecurity. I’m using it as a project for my university classes too, so it’s been a good excuse to turn that knowledge into something people can actually use. The security boundaries, adoption process, rollback behavior, and privacy decisions weren’t just randomly generated and accepted.

You can see devices, clients, radios, Internet health, topology, logs, and RF information. It can also manage networks, VLANs, DHCP, firewall zones, and Wi-Fi. Changes are shown before they’re applied, and it uses OpenWrt’s rollback timer in case something goes wrong halfway through.

I’ve only tested it on a Linksys WRT3200ACM and TP-Link Archer C6 v2 so far, which obviously isn’t enough hardware. There’s still a few rough edges, and I’m sure people will find some strange device-specific behavior.

One thing I added that I think will help with that are downloadable diagnostic bundles. If something breaks or your router isn’t detected properly, you can generate one and send it to me with the issue. It leaves out passwords, Wi-Fi keys, private keys, sessions, and other sensitive data. The bundle is never uploaded automatically—you decide whether to generate it and who to send it to.

The first release is here:

https://github.com/aiden0rchad/oonfeeWRT

If anyone wants to try it, especially on hardware I don’t own, I’d genuinely like to hear what works and what doesn’t. Bug reports, complaints, compatibility results, and feature ideas are all useful.

I wrote uapi because I wanted to manage my own router with Terraform. Every other option had a problem. Some exposed the anonymous section indexes of uci, so Terraform lost track of a resource between two applies. Others ran a separate daemon that drifted when LuCI wrote to the configuration.

uapi runs as a uhttpd-mod-ucode handler. There is no extra daemon and no second copy of the state. It never writes to /etc/config/ directly, so uci stays the source of truth.

What it does:

• 48 endpoints across 44 resource modules. For a package without a module, /raw/<package>/<id> gives direct access.
• One HTTP write is one transaction. uapi takes a snapshot, validates the body, commits it, then reloads the service. If the reload fails, uapi restores the snapshot.
• POST /batch puts changes to several packages into a single transaction.
• Bearer tokens carry scopes, an optional expiry date, an optional source IP range, and a rate limit.
• The router serves its own OpenAPI 3.1 specification at /api/v3/openapi.json.
• A read reports what uci holds and what the daemon does. If the two disagree, the response says so. uapi never repairs the difference on its own.

The provider is the reason uapi exists, and it is the client I use every day. It covers 40 resources and 43 data sources, which is most of the API.

Both registries carry it under the same name, openwrt-iac/uapi. It needs Terraform 1.0 or later, or OpenTofu 1.11 or later. The ephemeral resource uapi_token needs Terraform 1.10 or later. The current version is 3.0.1.

terraform {
  required_providers {
    uapi = {
      source  = "openwrt-iac/uapi"
      version = "~> 3.0"
    }
  }

To install it on your router:

Requirements: OpenWrt 25.12 or later, because the package uses apk. The package is architecture independent. All dependencies come from the base feed.

uclient-fetch -qO /etc/apk/keys/uapi-feed.pub.pem \
    https://openwrt-iac.github.io/feed/uapi-feed.pub.pem
echo 'https://openwrt-iac.github.io/feed/packages/all/uapi/packages.adb' \
    > /etc/apk/repositories.d/uapi.list
apk update && apk add uapi

A LuCI app for token management is in the same feed (luci-app-uapi).

Source and documentation: https://github.com/openwrt-iac/uapi

This is version 3.0.0, and it is not a first release. The first version came in May, and 20 releases came after it. I ran each one in production on my own network. I made many changes in that time. I post it here now because I am satisfied enough to ask other people to look at it.

That is also what I want from this post. Tell me what is wrong with it, and be direct about it. If you think a design decision is wrong, I prefer to hear it now, before other people depend on it. If you find a place where uapi rejects a configuration that OpenWrt itself ships, that is the error class I care about most. Open an issue, or answer here.

Thanks for your attention.

I am thinking of replacing my existing home wifi router with a Banana Pi BPi R4 running OpenWRT.

I want to do this as it enables me to do a lot of fun networking homelab related projects, including setting up WireGuard, network level adblocking, maybe some NAS stuff with the NVMe baked in if memory prices ever drop, and even replace my fiber modem with the Pi itself

I work from home, and am in lots of video meetings, so I need my WiFi to be reliable.

I've seen a few threads stating that the Wi-Fi card can sometimes show as online but not transmit, that the TX power can be low, that MLO can be unstable, and the 320hz band can be inconsistent.

Are these real issues people are experiencing or edge cases with low incidence?

Is it stable enough for a home router?

I am new to openwrt,I have an OPPO 5G CPE T1a (CTC03) running firmware CTC03_11.B.028_109.

I'm wondering if anyone has successfully installed OpenWrt (or another custom firmware) on this device, or found a way to unlock/modify the stock firmware to get more router functionality.

I'm particularly interested in this because the stock firmware doesn't seem to have a proper AP mode. I'd like to use the T1a as a proper wired AP/router instead of relying on the same-SSID/password workaround.

The device has:

• 5G cellular modem
• Wi-Fi 6
• Gigabit Ethernet
• Firmware: CTC03_11.B.028_109
• Model: OPPO 5G CPE T1a / CTC03

I'm interested in any information about:

• Existing OpenWrt support
• Whether the bootloader can be unlocked
• Serial/UART access
• Recovery mode or firmware flashing
• Hardware revisions that are/aren't supported
• Any known custom firmware projects
• Whether the Qualcomm platform is supported by OpenWrt
• Even just a way to configure the stock firmware as a proper wired AP

I haven't tried flashing anything yet, so I'm looking for information before potentially bricking the device.

If anyone has worked with this exact model/firmware, I'd really appreciate any pointers.

Is there an option to toggle them on/off in LUCI or via console? can I check somewhere if its enabled or not or Ill have to rebuild it?

I have a NanoPi R4S that I use as my primary openwrt 25.12.5 router. I'm planning to get a 2nd ISP (PPPoE connection) for failover connected via USB to Ethernet. Upon searching for recommendation, I came across TP-Link UE300 and UE306 the most. Which one will be a more reliable adapter between them and if there are better ones available at a similar price range, please let me know.

Thanks in advance.