The card reader isn’t relevant here. We are talking here about the USB interface to the modem, which goes through the same USB hub multifunction chip but is not obviously influenced by the card reader function of that chip. See the diagram here: Why is internal card reader so slow? - #2 by FranklyFlawless
The question here is about the bottleneck for download via the cellular modem (either the BM818 or this one).
It’s still true that we will need Librem 5 v2 in order to get full value out of either 4G or 5G.
Can you help me understand what “Librem 5 v2” means? Are they working on a whole new board, chassis, modems, etc? Or are you referring to the “Liberty Phone” which I’ve noticed has a little more RAM than my L5USA?
Not really. It was just a “hypothetical” device. I have no inside knowledge.
Purism has publicly stated that they are testing new modems.
Purism has publicly talked about the Librem 5 v2 but I had the impression that it is in pretty early planning stages e.g. as compared with the recently publicly mentioned roadmap for 2026:
Librem 16, Librem 14 v2, Librem Mini v3.
“Public” means any or all of: this forum, newsletter, blog post.
I guess it is an open question as to how the Librem 5 and the Liberty Phone / Librem 5 USA move forward to v2 i.e. together in parallel v. diverging v. converging. I do think it is too early to answer that.
All the scripts must be used in the initial order for this to be able to be pulled properly right?
There’s been some problems with the scripts to get persistency and it hasn’t been worked on on checked in a while. The needed manual console commands need to be in order:
sudo modprobe option && sudo modprobe qmi_wwan && sudo modprobe cdc_wdm, and thenecho 1 | sudo tee /sys/bus/usb/devices/1-1.2/authorized [specific device path used (that 1-1.2) is identified from lsusb and logs from turning modem HWKS on/off/on and doing sudo dmesg | tail - 50]These should be all that’s needed to get the modem to appear (may take a few seconds to initialize).
Can be scripted at boot?
Should be, could be. If you read the thread or wiki, you can see what I tried but at some point some update either changed something or there’s some bug but the scripts didn’t work reliably. I never run down that nor pinponted what was at fault - I was optimistic that Crimson release would come sooner and be a new stable platform with newer modemmannager but… still waiting.
Well Crimson is in beta
Is this working/stable for you on Crimson? Any changes needed? I found one of these second hand and would like to try it as long as it’s working well.
Yes, it works with Crimson. The caveats: the scripts to automate modem activation have not been fixed - you still need to run two commands from terminal when starting:
sudo modprobe option && sudo modprobe qmi_wwan && sudo modprobe cdc_wdm (after boot, after using HWKS)echo 1 | sudo tee /sys/bus/usb/devices/1-1.2/authorized (seems also to re-activate modem if it goes down for some reason)Crimson is still using the old modemmanager, so phosh is not showing 5G emblem in the top left corner, but 4G/5G seems to be working fine (haven’t noticed any other difference to Crimson backports which uses the newer versions of phosh and modemmanager). Stability is ok [to me, it’s the same better as with BM-818], but there is the occasional modem shutdown - this was never looked at and was waiting for mm being updated, and could be worked around if the script was fixed (reactivation with the echo... command).
I’m curious to hear how it works for you (in your L5 and in your network)!
Thanks. Will try it when I have some time. I will probably try using a systemd unit to run the scripts after the multi user target is reached.