Mwan3 - Tag - Lorenzo's Bloghttps://www.k8s.it/tags/mwan3/Mwan3 - Tag - Lorenzo's BlogHugo -- gohugo.ioenFri, 25 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000Building an LTE Fallback for My Flaky FTTC with a $45 ZTE MF286D and OpenWrthttps://www.k8s.it/posts/zte-mf286d-openwrt-lte-fallback-fttc/Fri, 25 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000Lorenzo Girardihttps://www.k8s.it/posts/zte-mf286d-openwrt-lte-fallback-fttc/

Table of Contents

  • Why a Fallback at All
  • Picking the Hardware
  • Flashing OpenWrt
  • The LTE Interface: qmi and the Vodafone APN
  • Multi-WAN with mwan3
  • An Emergency Wi-Fi AP
  • The LuCI Dashboard, in Practice
  • Conclusion
  • Reflections

Here we are. In Italy, and we all know how it goes: it works today, tomorrow who knows.

Why a Fallback at All

I live in the countryside outside town, more farmland than periphery really, so I already count myself lucky to have FTTC at all. Mine is saturated and picks up crosstalk (diafonia) from neighboring pairs, which means the sync rate wanders and, every so often, the line just drops for hours.

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