GL.iNet Mudi 7
tl;dr: After almost seven years my Netgear Nighthawk M2 has started rebooting on its own, reporting nonsensical battery percentages and ignoring most of my presses on its touch buttons, so I spent the past three months replacing it with the GL.iNet Mudi 7 ( GL-E5800 ), a 5G NR Sub-6 travel router with two nano-SIM slots plus an onboard eSIM, Wi-Fi 7, a 2.5 GbE port, two USB-C ports and a removable 5380 mAh battery. It is the most capable mobile router I have owned, its 13.5-hour battery rating is close to what I measure, and the LTE reception alone is a clear upgrade over the M2 . Sadly the Tri-band on the box means two bands at a time, there is no MLO at all, both SIM trays are underneath the battery, the touchscreen still can’t get you through a captive portal, and firmware 4.8.5 has a cellular defect that leaves the device on Connecting… after a carrier deactivates an idle data session. If you came to the Mudi line for blue-merle and IMEI randomization, you might be disappointed to learn that this sadly seems to have ended with the GL-E750 . Earlier this year I reviewed the GL.iNet Slate 7 ( GL-BE3600 ), the Wi-Fi 7 travel router that replaced my long-running Linksys WRT3200 ACM as the router in my travel setup . I mentioned in that post that I was also in the process of replacing my even older Netgear Nighthawk M2 , the LTE-A Cat. 20 hotspot that has handled my mobile data for almost seven years now. The M2 has been a reliable piece of equipment, however, it has started misbehaving so badly that I no longer trust on the road. Random reboots, increasingly nonsensical battery percentages, and touch buttons that no longer register most presses make it a tedious device to use, and with it well past any expectation of longevity, I figured it was time to give its successor a proper, multi-month trial before the M2 gives up entirely in the middle of some airport lounge. The device I settled on is the GL.iNet Mudi 7 ( GL-E5800 ), a 5G NR Sub-6 Tri-band Wi-Fi 7 travel router that GL.iNet unveiled at CES 2026 and started shipping back in April. On paper the device is an upgrade over both the Netgear M2 and the Mudi V2 aka GL-E750V2 , which was still a 4G/LTE Cat. 6 device with a 0.96" OLED. The Mudi 7 packs Qualcomm ’s Dragonwing MBB Gen 3 platform, a Wi-Fi 7 PHY with a 6 GHz radio, two nano-SIM slots plus an onboard eSIM, two USB-C ports, a 2.5 GbE Ethernet port, a 2.8" color touchscreen, and a removable 5380 mAh battery, all in a 157x75x22.8mm, 300g enclosure that runs OpenWrt with GL.iNet ’s firmware layer on top. At $419.99, or roughly €425, it is also the most expensive device GL.iNet sells. Just like the Slate 7 , the Mudi 7 is above most consumer travel routers. It comes with a 5G NR Sub-6 Rel-17 NSA/SA modem with LTE Cat. 20 (DL) / Cat. 18 (UL) fallback, and the exact specifications of the hardware are as follows: Apart from having a modem, the second difference from the Slate 7 is the 6 GHz radio, which the Slate 7 lacks entirely. However, the Tri-band on the box is a bit misleading. The Mudi 7 has radios for all three bands, but the chipset cannot drive 5 GHz and 6 GHz simultaneously, so you configure the device as either 2.4 + 5 GHz or 2.4 + 6 GHz. This also means the Mudi 7 has no Multi-Link Operation at all. On the Slate 7 I complained that GL.iNet ’s MLO documentation advertises a 6 GHz band that the hardware doesn’t have. On the Mudi 7 the 6 GHz band is present and MLO is gone, which is an odd trade for a device that costs nearly three times as much. There are two regional variants, GL-E5800NA for North America and GL-E5800EU for Europe, with different 5G NR and LTE band coverage, which is important to travelers like myself. Both variants cover n5, n7, n26, n38, n41, n77 and n78. Beyond that they diverge, as the EU model adds n1, n3, n8, n20, n28, n40 and n75, while the NA model adds n2, n12, n14, n25, n30, n48, n66 and n71, plus n13, n29 and n70 in SA mode only. LTE splits the same way, with the EU model on FDD B1, B3, B5, B7, B8, B20, B28 and B32 and TDD B38, B40, B41, B42 and B43, and the NA model on FDD B2, B4, B5, B7, B12, B13, B14, B17, B25, B26, B29, B30, B66 and B71 and TDD B38, B41, B42, B43 and B48. For my use case (almost exclusively APAC/LATAM) the EU variant turned out to be the more sensible choice, but anyone moving frequently between North America and the rest of the world should read both band lists carefully before ordering. To be fair, though, the Nighthawk M2 splits even harder. Netgear ships that device as at least five separate SKUs, and the band list for each one is quite short. The box itself contains the Mudi 7 , the battery pack, a relatively big travel pouch, a USB-C cable, and the paper manual. No external antennas and no power adapter, which I appreciate, given the chargers I already lug around. The headline feature is the modem, which uses the Dragonwing platform, Qualcomm ’s rebranded enterprise and mobile-broadband lineup. In practice the 4.67 Gbps peak figure is, as with virtually all hyped peak numbers, marketing material. Real-world throughput depends primarily on the carrier’s network, the SIM plan, the spectrum allocation, the band combination, and the signal conditions at your specific location. In my own testing I have seen sustained downlink figures in the 600–900 Mbps range on a properly-provisioned 5G network, and significantly less (in the 100–250 Mbps range) on a more typical mixed NSA deployment. What’s more important, though, is the LTE fallback. The modem falls back to LTE Cat. 20 (DL) / Cat. 18 (UL) and is significantly more sensitive than the M2 ’s aging Qualcomm baseband. In the same hotel rooms where my M2 used to show a single LTE bar at best, the Mudi 7 can consistently show two or three, often pulling more usable bandwidth on the same SIM and the same carrier. Lastly, the Mudi 7 has two TS-9 external antenna ports for those of us who care to bolt on a pair of paddle or directional antennas in RV/cabin/dead-zone scenarios. I haven’t bothered to test these, as my use case doesn’t involve any of that. However, these days most people might have almost exclusively converted to Starlink anyway, so the external antennas might not be as much of a selling point as they were ten years ago. The Mudi 7 has two Nano-SIM slots and one onboard eSIM. Both Nano-SIMs and the eSIM are managed via the touchscreen and the web UI. However, it’s important to note that the Dual SIM Dual Standby in this context means dual standby with an asterisk. The onboard eSIM and SIM slot 2 are mutually exclusive and cannot be active at the same time. The eSIM is disabled by default, and the moment you enable it, SIM 2 stops functioning. SIM 1 remains operational either way, and the modem can auto-switch (i.e. fail over) between SIM 1 and whichever of SIM 2 / eSIM is currently active, but you do not get to keep three simultaneously hot profiles. For anyone hoping to keep a local SIM, a regional roaming eSIM, and a home-country SIM in standby together, this is a bit of a disappointment. Failover itself has also been more rigid than I expected. The web UI exposes the auto-switch feature, including data-usage thresholds and signal-loss triggers, but the failover decision-making has been slow in practice. A complete loss of signal usually does cause a switchover within a reasonable amount of time, but more nuanced situations (such as one SIM throttling without any indication, or losing data while still showing connected ) often require a manual nudge. GL.iNet ’s documentation describes far more sophisticated multi-WAN coordination than the SIM-side auto-switch logic delivers. Then again, to be fair, Mwan3 on the Linksys has had similar issues and I guess down detection is just a complicated thing to get right. One caveat is that both Nano-SIM trays are underneath the battery , so putting a card in or taking one out means having the device powered down, prying off the back cover, and pulling the battery out. On a product aimed at people who buy a local SIM on arrival, that is a weird design. Then again, in many cases the device is probably already powered off because you arrived by airplane anyway. Switching between profiles that are already provisioned (either physical-to-physical or physical-to-eSIM) is one of the things the touchscreen handles well, and it doesn’t normally require any detours into the admin UI. Speaking of which, just like the Slate 7 , the Mudi 7 comes with a built-in touch display, though here it is a 2.8" color LCD rather than the much smaller panel on the Slate 7 . The screen shows the usual variety of things, like signal strength and current network type, connected client count, real-time data usage, battery percentage, Wi-Fi details with a QR code for quick joining, and the ability to toggle the VPN, the Wi-Fi, and a couple of other features without opening the admin UI. Firmware upgrades also display a progress bar on the screen, which (as I had complained about with the Linksys ) is a small but welcome quality-of-life feature. The notable thing missing from the touchscreen is captive portal handling. The moment the upstream WAN is a hotel or airport Wi-Fi network with a captive portal in the middle, the touchscreen is useless and you have to reach for a phone, tablet, or laptop, attach to the Mudi 7 , open a browser, and go through the portal manually before the router (and everything behind it) can reach the internet. But to be fair, a 2.8" panel is probably a poor place to render an HTML login form and a keyboard to begin with. The lockscreen with a 4-digit PIN that was introduced on the Slate 7 is also present on the Mudi 7 , which I once again appreciate, given the kind of sensitive information (carrier and SIM details, VPN state, hostnames) that this screen displays. One annoying quirk is the battery percentage reporting. Both the LCD and the web UI will, after a full charge, stay at 100% for the first 1–3 hours of unplugged operation before catching up to reality and dropping rapidly to whatever the actual state of charge is. The underlying kernel fuel-gauge driver does report accurate values (you can confirm this via SSH and ), but from what I can see the MCU layer that drives the LCD and the admin UI applies some smoothing to avoid the device displaying 98–99% immediately after charging. I would much rather see the truth on the screen than a smoothed consumer-friendly approximation, especially on a device whose entire purpose is to be unplugged for long stretches. The Mudi 7 shipped with OpenWrt 23.05.4 ( , Kernel ), with GL.iNet ’s firmware layer on top. The device runs Qualcomm ’s proprietary SDK and binary blobs. The same software-openness caveats that apply to the Slate 7 apply here as well. You get full root SSH access, the configuration tree, and the ability to side-load the LuCI UI if you want, but you’re stuck with GL.iNet ’s firmware for anything that touches the cellular or Wi-Fi 7 silicon. The original Mudi ( GL-E750 ) is the device that blue-merle was written for, the SRLabs package that changes the IMEI via AT commands on the device’s modem, wipes the stored client MAC addresses, and randomizes the BSSID and the WAN MAC address across reboots, and it is a large part of why the Mudi line got its reputation as the privacy-focused travel router in the first place. However, blue-merle supports the GL-E750 and nothing else, and with the 5G modem, the firmware base, and the entire platform having changed underneath it, there is no indication that this is going to change. If IMEI randomization is the reason you were looking at a Mudi specifically, the Mudi 7 does not give you that, at least today. To be fair, the firmware layer is also what makes the device usable out of the box. The Multi-WAN , WireGuard , OpenVPN , Tailscale , AdGuard Home , DNScrypt-proxy2 , Tor , and the modem management features are all preinstalled and reachable via a friendly web UI, which (as I had mentioned in the Slate 7 review) is a substantial step up over the bare vanilla OpenWrt experience on an older router like my WRT3200 ACM . The Mudi 7 supports WireGuard with up to 600 Mbps. I have been running my own WireGuard tunnel on the device, routing the entire LAN through it, and it has kept up with whatever the upstream 5G or LTE connection could deliver. As with the Slate 7 , Tailscale is available, with the same caveats. Basic connectivity works, but anything beyond the default configuration (exit nodes with advanced flags, subnet routing, tagged ACLs, etc.) is going to require manual intervention via SSH. The Mudi 7 can, like the Slate 7 , run a Tor node and route LAN traffic over it. The moment Tor is enabled, VPNs , DNS , AdGuard Home and IPv6 will not work properly anymore, because the firmware doesn’t (yet) compose these services the way a hand-rolled OpenWrt setup can. Note: As I had explained in the Slate 7 review , these limitations are 100% a GL.iNet issue and not caused by OpenWrt . The same combinations work fine if you wire them up by hand on top of a vanilla OpenWrt installation, including DNS lookups via Tor through DNScrypt-proxy2 . The UI just isn’t there yet on the GL.iNet side. AdGuard Home is, as on the Slate 7 , part of the default installation and just as plug-’n-play. I still don’t use it personally, but the web UI is identical to the one on the Slate 7 and works fine in the configurations I have tested. The Mudi 7 differentiates itself from most travel routers in the number of uplinks it can hold at once, as the device supports up to five concurrent WAN inputs: The cellular modem, the 2.5 GbE Ethernet port (when configured as WAN), Wi-Fi-as-WAN (i.e. repeater mode), USB-C tethering from a phone or a secondary modem, and USB-C-attached USB Ethernet adapters. The firmware uses Multi-WAN underneath, with a friendly UI on top. Router, access point and extender modes are all supported, WDS is not. The device features dual USB-C, with one of the USB-C ports being power-only. The other USB-C port is a fully-featured 10 Gbps port with USB tethering, and USB OTG support. It’s possible to charge the Mudi 7 on one port while simultaneously tethering on the other. USB tethering itself, just like on the Slate 7 , is a matter of a few clicks in the UI. Plug a phone in, enable tethering on the phone, and the Mudi 7 picks it up as a USB Ethernet WAN. The same applies to a USB-to-Ethernet adapter, should you ever need to add a second wired WAN or to bridge into a hotel’s wired LAN where Wi-Fi is unreliable. I have had the Mudi 7 for roughly three months now, and the tl;dr is that the device is pretty solid overall, with a handful of caveats around firmware quirks and the chunkier footprint. Battery life is a bit of a mixed bag here, because it depends a lot on what features/services are running on the Mudi 7 , on the amount of WiFi clients and how cellular coverage is. Let me therefore put it this way: For the amount of features you get with the Mudi , especially compared to my older M2 , the battery life is decent. Having that said, however, I do believe that the Nighthawk , at least in its earlier days, was able to survive longer on a single charge than the Mudi is able to right now. Obviously I don’t have scientific benchmarks to prove it, but I remember vividly being out and about with the M2 for a full day and going to bed with the device only around halfway drained. This is something that I don’t think is possible with the GL.iNet . While the device easily gets through a regular workday, I probably wouldn’t trust it to survive a full day road trip with four friends through a mountainous region. Ultimately, its battery life can be extended using an external powerbank, but that’s clearly not ideal with a device that already weighs 300g on its own. If we’re being honest here, 300g equals about two Google Pixel 5 or two Motorola Edge 30 phones, which can both provide you with a 5G hotspot and which will probably (combined) outlast the Mudi by at least a few hours. So if the pure 5G hotspotting capability is all you care about, the GL.iNet is definitely not a good option with regard to battery life. If, however, you’re looking at it as the centerpiece of your mobile LAN, that will allow you to leave your Slate 7 at home because it supports pretty much every important feature and offers integrated 5G connectivity on top of that, then its battery life isn’t too bad after all. The chassis warms up noticeably under sustained 5G load (especially with a VPN), but never to the point where I’d be concerned about throttling or comfort. The back gets warm to the touch, but no warmer than a mid-range phone under similar load, and certainly not as warm as my old M2 would get at times. Unlike with the Netgear , I haven’t experienced any heat warnings with the Mudi so far. The build quality is solid. The chassis has a reassuring density to it, the touchscreen is responsive, and the front button doesn’t feel flimsy. The back panel is a bit of a weak point, because it is a plastic snap-fit cover protecting the battery and it creaks under pressure. Given that this cover has to be pried off to swap the battery or a SIM, I’m half-expecting it to wear out relatively quickly. Weight and footprint, as I had anticipated in the travel desk write-up , are clearly worse than the M2 ’s. The Mudi 7 is heavier (300g vs the M2 ’s 240g) and noticeably chunkier in both length and width. In absolute terms this is still a small device, but on a packed desk and in a packed bag, the difference is noticeable. The included travel pouch is also larger than the router needs, because most of the extra volume is set aside for accessories. Most people probably won’t use the travel pouch for travel, but rather for storage at home. Charging behavior has been predictable. The 24W PD fast-charging input gets the 5380 mAh battery from 0% to ~80% in roughly an hour, and to full in about an hour and 45 minutes. The device accepts whatever USB-C PD source there is around, including my UGREEN 100W and the Sharge Pouch Mini P2 power bank. If you’re considering this device as a permanent member (or even a centerpiece) of your LAN, I have some good news for you: The Mudi 7 can be operated via USB-C, without its battery plugged in. I don’t know whether this is officially supported by GL.iNet , because when you connect a charger the display will show a battery icon with an exclamation mark inside of it, but long-pressing the front button will turn the device on nevertheless. I haven’t experienced any peaks in power-consumption that would lead to arbitrary restarts without the battery plugged-in, but your mileage may vary. Reliability has been pretty good, and I haven’t experienced any crashes, random reboots, or other issues. The only firmware-level oddities I have encountered are the battery reporting discussed above and the cellular issue in firmware 4.8.5 mentioned in the tl;dr : After a carrier deactivates an idle data session, the router can remain on Connecting… until I intervene. The Mudi 7 is probably one of the most capable travel-friendly mobile routers I have ever owned, and it has a permanent place in my travel setup . The 5G modem, the dual-SIM-plus-eSIM configuration, the dual USB-C ports, the 2.5 GbE port, the removable 5380 mAh battery, and the Wi-Fi 7 PHY can replace the M2 + Slate 7 combo for me, while also covering scenarios (5G, multi-SIM, multi-WAN, USB-C-tethered secondary modems) that the combo never could. While the 300g weight and the bulkier footprint are a step back compared to the M2 , if I account for the added size and weight of the Slate 7 that I had to lug around alongside the M2 to make the LAN work for me, then it doesn’t look as bad anymore. Then again, with the M2 + Slate 7 combo I had the flexibility to only bring what’s really needed, which, for e.g. a day trip, would end up being only the M2 . Apart from that, there is the Tri-band situation, with the chipset only driving two bands at once and offering no MLO at all, the SIM-failover logic, which doesn’t work as smoothly as one would expect, the SIM 2 vs eSIM mutual-exclusion, that is mildly annoying, and the battery percentage smoothing, that makes me distrust everything else the device reports. However, none of these are deal-breakers but more like minor inconveniences. The proprietary Qualcomm blob situation is the more concerning part for me, and as with the Slate 7 , the Mudi 7 is OpenWrt only in spirit , and its long-term wireless and cellular stack support depends entirely on GL.iNet and Qualcomm continuing to cooperate. If your priority is true software freedom, this device, like virtually every other 5G-capable router on the market today, is not for you. Neither is it for you if you bought into the Mudi name for blue-merle and IMEI randomization. If your priority is a modern, travel-ready, multi-WAN, multi-SIM 5G router with a solid (if proprietary) firmware on top, the Mudi 7 is, at the time of writing, the best option I’m aware of. I will be sticking with the Mudi 7 as my mobile-data device for the foreseeable future, and the Nighthawk M2 has been retired to the bottom of a drawer after seven years of service. PS: Make sure to check future updates if you’re interested in the long-term experience with the Mudi 7 .
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