An OpenWrt fork sits at the heart of GL.iNet's new Mudi 7, a battery-powered travel router that combines a Qualcomm 5G modem with tri-band WiFi 7 in a chassis small enough to drop in a jacket pocket. The third Mudi since the original 4G LTE model arrived in 2019, the GL-E5800 leans on a 2.8-inch touchscreen for on-device configuration and pairs an internal 5380 mAh battery with two USB-C ports for charging and tethering.
Inside the 157 x 75 x 22.8 mm (6.2 x 3.0 x 0.9 inches) shell sits an unnamed Qualcomm quad-core processor clocked at 2.2 GHz (likely the Cortex-A73 based IPQ9574), 2GB of LPDDR4X, and 8GB of eMMC. The cellular side uses the Qualcomm Dragonwing MBB Gen 3 platform built around the Snapdragon X72 modem, with peak downlink rated at 4.67 Gbps and uplink at 3.5 Gbps across Sub-6GHz 5G NR bands. WiFi 7 delivers up to 688 Mbps on 2.4 GHz, 2,882 Mbps on 5 GHz, and 5,764 Mbps on 6 GHz, fed by eight internal antennas plus two TS-9 connectors for externals. Wired backhaul runs through a single 2.5GbE port, and SIM connectivity covers two Nano SIM slots and an onboard eSIM. The router weighs 300 grams (10.6 oz) and is rated for roughly 13.5 hours of typical operation per charge over USB PD/PPS at up to 30W.
The software story is where the open-source angle gets complicated. The Mudi 7 ships with a vendor fork of OpenWrt 22.03 running Linux 5.15, several releases behind upstream OpenWrt 24.10, and uses the same Admin Panel v4.0 interface that has shipped on GL.iNet hardware for years. VPN throughput is the headline feature for travelers worried about hostile networks: the device pushes 700 Mbps through OpenVPN-DCO and 600 Mbps through WireGuard, figures that put it well ahead of older portable routers. Early hands-on coverage has flagged the absence of Multi-Link Operation (MLO) support, a WiFi 7 feature that lets clients aggregate channels across bands simultaneously, as the most notable omission given the spec sheet.
Announced at CES 2026 and shipping since April 2026, the Mudi 7 is now broadly available for $420 (€385) through GL.iNet's own store and the usual third-party channels. The older Mudi V2, still on 4G LTE and WiFi 5, remains in the lineup at $155 (€142) for buyers who don't need the 5G modem or the touchscreen.
