Huawei E5186 (prototype) reviewed
Thursday, March 12. 2015
As I mentioned earlier, a reader of this blog got a Huawei E5186 and I got to test drive it. The model is still in prototype and the semi-official rumour is, that it will be released Q2/2015. As usual, they are not sold directly by Huawei, but by telcos. The one I had was from Germany, T-mobile. The mobile side is pretty much same as in B593s-22, the exact model I had was in fact E5186s-22. Frequencies and modulations are: LTE FDD DD800/900/1800/2100/2600 and TDD 2600. It is very likely, that inside the box is a HiSilicon Android running on a ARM-chip.
It looks exactly like a B593. Here are the pics:
The first things I noticed, that the Tel1 and Tel2 RJ-11 connectors are missing. Also: no USB!! What! I found information from discussion boards, that this particular T-Mobile version is a "poor man's model". There does exist other E5186 models, which have USB and the Tel-connectors.
As a B593 has, there are dual antenna connectors and they are SMA:
For testing this router I didn't need external antennas, the RF-side is much more sensitive than in a B593. In a location where I normally have one bar (without external antenna), this one got three (out of five). Nice!
If you'd want to pop the hood, it opens like B593 does, from the bottom:
All Huawei-hardware has a thin paper on top of one screw. This is to indicate if that screw was removed to void any warranty. I didn't open it, it wasn't my own box.
The web-GUI is completely new:
Everything looked brand new, so had to port-scan the thing:
PORT STATE SERVICE 53/tcp open domain 80/tcp open http MAC Address: 38:F8:89:03:1C:36 (Unknown)
What a surprise! Nothing there. Nothing! No SSH, no FTP, no Samba, no HTTPS. A B593 has plenty of ports open, but this beast is closed as a clam.
A cursory check on the HTML and JavaScript prooved, that entire front was re-written. B593 front has issues on security and functionality, this thing is entirely jQuery / AJAX -based thing. All the requests transfer XML. I was expecting JSON, but hey, it works. I guess there is something on back-end, which runs better on XML.
As the stripped-down hardware suggests, the web-GUI has very little options:
No real surprises there. The only thing, that really caught my eye, was the 5GHz WLAN which B593 doesn't have. There must be some new electronics inside.
This is the device information screen:
As it happened, also Finnish magazine happened to review the E5186. I don't have a permission for reprint, but here is a small glimpse what they said:
As a conclusion, the mag loved the box. I don't know which version they had, but this one without USB I don't especially love. It's too pricey without the port. Under the hood, the AJAX-API has a ton of features not available via your web browser. I'll get back to that subject later.