The Huawei E8372 wifi mobile dongle (coined "wingle" by Huawei themselves) is one of the most useful devices for sharing mobile data (other than using the personal hotspot on the mobile which can drain your phone battery).
I have used it to good effect plugged into the USB port in the car to provide Wifi to all the passengers as well as on my laptop for a direct mobile connection.
Similarly, the GL-Inet routers are feature-rich devices with decent software that can provide VPN-secured (both openVPN and Wireguard) connections for all the mobile devices connected to its wireless network.
However, trying to put these two splendid devices to work together has been such a painful chore that I will just summarise briefly the three or four steps for this combination to be successful.
The main problem is because both devices use IP address 192.168.8.1 as their configuration page, which creates a conflict.
The resolution is as follows:
Change the LAN IP of the GL-Inet router to 192.168.10.1 instead. This can be easily done by either connect a laptop to the LAN or wireless broadcast by the router once the setup is completed.
You can now reset the E8372 wingle to its default state, plug it into the GL-Inet router and the mobile connection should work via the tethering feature of the router. If it does not, what I found most helpful was to download the GL-Inet app and Enable the Tethering from there instead of trying to use the config page at 192.168.10.1.
If you want to avoid confusing yourself with multiple SSIDs, it may be good to disable the wifi on the Wingle as well so that you will only see the SSID of the GL-Inet router.
Posted 2023/7/14 - 4 min read