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Created January 9, 2016 00:24
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How to use your Surfline Mi-Fi device as you please
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e5372-debrand.md

Did you sign up with Surfline Ghana as part of their Surfprise promotion, enticed by the offer of a free Mi-Fi hotspot that you could use even if you decided to change providers in the future?

Unfortunately, it turns out, Surfline cripples the power of the Huawei E5372 they so freely gave you - not just by locking the device to their carrier, but by removing its ability to connect to radio bands not used by its network. Not so useful that "the device is yours forever" with such anti-customer behavior in place!

Since they won't help us, let's help ourselves:

The trick is called debranding

If you buy a "stock" Huawei E5372 you'll see it play nicely on pretty much any network because the excellent hardware inside supports many 3G and 4G bands. Surfline's firmware intentionally removes these capabilities, so we'll use the magic of software to bring your Mi-Fi back to its stock configuration.

The two locks we'll need to break to achieve this:

  • SIM unlock - this code lets you use anyone's SIM card in your device, not just Surfline's
  • Flash unlock - this code allows you to use Huawei's unrestrictive firmware on your device, so you can connect to any network supported by the hardware

So what do I need to do?

Please read all the steps before you begin! In particular, step 8 may take a day or two to complete.

Start by gathering your Mi-Fi device (charged), the SIM card for your new carrier (e.g. pop out the one in your cell phone), a micro-USB cable and your laptop.

  1. Pop the battery cover off the back of your Mi-Fi, and remove the Surfline SIM card
  2. Take note of the 15-digit IMEI number, most likely labeled on inside of the device behind where the battery sat
  3. On your laptop (steps here are for Windows 8.1):
  • Press Win + R and in the box that appears, type cmd and press enter to open the Command Prompt
  • Type ipconfig /all | find "Gateway" and press enter
  • Don't worry about the output of this yet; we'll get back to it in a second
  1. Insert your new SIM card into the Mi-Fi, then the battery, then power it on and plug it into your laptop via USB
  2. Once the Mi-Fi starts up your laptop should join a local network automatically, so a few seconds after the Welcome message appears on the Mi-Fi display:
  • Return to the Command Prompt, again type ipconfig /all | find "Gateway" and press enter (shortcut: press up arrow and it'll reuse what you just typed)
  • Now find the new line that wasn't there the first time, should have an IP address that looks like 192.168.8.1
  1. Open your web browser and go to http://192.168.8.1 using the number you located in step 5
  2. If all's going well so far, you should see the "web UI" for your Mi-Fi load. Click the Settings link in the navigation bar, and you should be prompted for a username and password
  • If you've never used this before, the defaults are admin for both
  1. Now we need to get an unlock code for your device. Unfortunately this part does cost a bit of money (not everything in life is free!) but you can get one here for about $6, which sure beats the price of buying a new unlocked device
  • He'll want your IMEI number from step 2, as well as the specific model (if it's the white Surfprise one, that is Surfline Ghana model E5372)
  1. With your unlock code in hand, go to the Security section in the web UI, and find the SIM settings/unlock link (name of the link may vary). Type the correct PIN and you should then be prompted to reboot. Let it do so!
  2. At this point your device is "SIM unlocked" and we now need to "flash unlock" it to restore the hardware capabilities disabled by Surfline. Start by downloading this RAR archive, and using a program such as Free Unrar to extract its contents to your desktop
  3. Ensure your Mi-Fi is still plugged in, and run the Huawei firmware update tool named E5372_Update_...
  4. Click through the steps in the wizard and it will detect your Mi-Fi. When prompted for a flash code, you can follow the process on this site using your IMEI from step 2 (this time without a fee, just a follow on social media) to get the code
  5. Let the wizard complete and when your Mi-Fi restarts again, you should see a Huawei logo on startup instead of the Surfline logo. Congratulations!
  6. As an optional last step, you can also update the web UI using this RAR archive and running the Update_WEBUI_... tool inside. Don't worry about the driver if you were already able to complete step 11 successfully
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