Changing DNS server for Huawei LTE router

Currently, we use a Huawei LTE router at home. I recently noticed that DNS resolution got very slow. By default, an operating system like macOS uses the router as DNS server. The router itself proxies these DNS request to the DNS server of your ISP. So, it seemed like our ISP’s DNS server had some performance issues. The performance did not get better in the following days.

Therefore, I changed the DNS server - popular public alternatives are Cloudflare DNS & Google DNS. You can either change the DNS settings of your computer, but this means that DNS resolution for this specific device gets fixed. Better is to change the DNS settings on router level.

For our Huawei router, the DNS setting is hidden inside the “Advanced => DHCP” menu. On the “DHCP” page, open the web console (e.g. on macOS: Command + Option + I, then go to tab “Console”). Then, execute the command $('#dhcp_dns').show();. Now, a checkbox “Set DNS server manually” should appear. When you enable it, you can set primary and secondary DNS servers. For example, for Cloudflare DNS, set these to 1.1.1.1 and 1.0.0.1.

(via bornoe.org)