P14S Gen 6 AMD - WWAN Whitelist?

[H-Atkinson]

I'm curious if anyone knows whether the P14S Gen 6 AMD (or either T14 Gen 6) has a WWAN whitelist. I can't find any info on this.

Further, Lenovo seems to limit the Ryzen 9 370 HX and not allow you to configure it (21RV) with WWAN. With that said, I don't see any reason that one couldn't just swap out the keyboard deck + bottom cover for the versions with the WWAN cutouts and add the antennas after the fact. Looking at photos of the parts and at the HMM doesn't indicate any incompatibility.

Has anyone explored any of this?

[H-Atkinson]

Well I've answered my own question, one way or another. TL;DR: Yes, the P14S Gen 6 AMD whitelists you to specific Quectel cards that Lenovo has flagged in Quectel's FW with a custom model #.

I ended up getting a P14S Gen 6 (21RV) with the Ryzen 9 HX 370 shipped from the factory with WWAN. When I was building the machine in the CTO tool, I noticed that you could not select WWAN and remove the Windows license (ie select Linux from the factory) at the same time. I didn't think much of it since Lenovo has done strange segmentation stuff in the CTO tool before. That was a mistake - it turns out they limit it like this because the Quectel card is entirely nonfunctional under Linux. The card is detected correctly and loads drivers, but configuring an APN is impossible. Doing so through a GUI (ie Gnome on RHEL) will outright crash the settings application, and forcing a config through with nmcli doesn't resolve issues (though some posts online seemed to indicate mixed success with that).

Out of desperation (and not expecting much in the first place), I tried a spare Sierra Wireless 5G card - the machine won't boot with it in, there's a WWAN whitelist. If its anything like the P14S/T14 Gen 5, its for Lenovo-specific WWAN cards. Great! Thank you Lenovo for locking the AMD model to a bargain-bin Quectel card that doesn't work, then stopping us from bringing our own to remedy your poor choice of vendor.

And on top of all of that, the Mediatek WLAN card has been nothing but trouble too - random slowdowns to double-digits bits (!!!) per second on an Aruba WiFi 6E network on which I've not had a single issue from another device. Given all this I'm strongly considering returning the system. I hadn't bought a Thinkpad in almost 4 years and have been daily-driving a Toughbook FZ-55 Mk3 while my P1 Gen 5 mostly just collects dust. This was a pretty rude reminder of the kinds of product design choices that drove me away in the first place.

[RealBlackStuff]

Currently my 'newest' Thinkpad is a T480 from 2018.
When that dies, I'll get something from the competition, no more LeNoNo for me.

[dr_st]

Currently my 'newest' Thinkpad is a T480 from 2018.
When that dies, I'll get something from the competition, no more LeNoNo for me.

I'm stuck one generation earlier than that, for a reason you surely know.
Well, the corporate-issued work laptop doesn't count.