dell-dw5821e¶
Dell DW5821e — Snapdragon X20 LTE modem on USB, the field laptop's current WWAN card
Vendor: Dell · class: wwan-modem
Status: untested — catalogued from documented sources, not yet proven here.
Not maintainer-verified: nobody on this project has run this hardware yet. The two facts are recorded separately on purpose (D-027) — a correct recipe and a tested device are different claims.
What it is¶
A Dell LTE modem on the Qualcomm Snapdragon X20 (its USB product string says so), fitted in a laptop's WWAN slot and presented to the kernel on the USB bus. On the field laptop it is the card that stands in for the 5G DW5930e until that one is back in the machine.
What you can do with it¶
Be parked and woken from the CLI, the generated menu entries or the tray (the class's usb_deauthorize), or quieted without detaching through the NetworkManager radio switch. Under ModemManager it is the host modem the cellular tooling reads (issue #69).
Setup¶
Nothing to install: ModemManager and NetworkManager drive it. A SIM and an APN are the operator's. Run hammunition hardware park wwan-modem to park and hammunition hardware wake wwan-modem to wake; hammunition hardware state shows which. Parking and waking have not been run on this card.
Known problems¶
Measured read-only on 2026-10-01 only. This card is carried as a USB device and parked the way a GPS receiver is; what NetworkManager and ModemManager do when it vanishes and returns is unmeasured. The design notes in docs/superpowers/specs/2026-09-27-device-kept-off-design.md call this card FCC-locked, so it may not register on every network; that is the card's, not the catalog's, and it was not re-measured here.
How it identifies itself¶
| USB id | What | Confirmed | Node |
|---|---|---|---|
413c:81d7 |
Dell DW5821e Snapdragon X20 LTE | yes | serial |
⚠ 413c:81d7 is not unique to this device (shared_across_products; also used by: modemmanager and usb-modeswitch-data rules, both naming the DW5821e). On the generated list in docs/reference/usb-ambiguity.md: the sweep sees the pair in modemmanager's rules and in usb-modeswitch-data and reads two names, "Dell DW5821e" and "if 05: diag/qcdm port"; the second labels interface 05 of the same card, so nothing here is evidence of another product. The device that carries it is the one read.