Banana Pi - BPI-R4 Wifi 7 Router board

It's not perfect, but the Banana Pi r4 supports a wifi7 card and it's shaping up nicely.

This! Comes with a modified version of OpenWrt out of the box and you can flash the version with open source drivers through the web UI. No hassle with ftp servers or workarounds to gain ssh access, it is wifi 6 though. Just to name a few more options: - Banana Pi BPI-R3 (Almost the same hardware as the GLinet 6000 but more expandable, the enclosure needs to be bought separately) - Banana Pi BPI-R4 w. wifi 7 module (Wifi 7, although it comes with a hefty pricetag and is still in development. Also doesn't come with an enclosure) - OpenWrt One (Less powerful processor and wifi hardware. It's marginally cheaper than the MT6000, is expandable and offers some nice features in case you brick it ) All of the options above are more or less intended for tinkering, although I suppose you could daily drive any of them. If you just want a product intended for consumers with a stable openwrt release, you should go with the GLinet MT6000. If you are just going to use it as a router and firewall, you could also go the opnsense/pfsense route.

There are no good wifi 7 routers. I think the Bannapi is the only one and reviews are mixed. I get 400mbps about 1500ft from my router through walls in a pretty radio congested space on my MT-6000. I’m perfectly happy for $100. All of my gear that needs more bandwidth has either fiber and SFP+ or SFP28 optics on the other end or a 2.5/5/10G base-T (the normal Ethernet jack) running to it. 500mbps on my laptop when I’m just roaming around the house, or on my phone or iPad? All good. The 6ghz band is emptier but it’s also attenuated (blocked/weakened) even worse than 5ghz is by any obstacles. TLDR- you probably don’t need wifi 7, maybe go with a good wifi 6 box.

1. BPI-R4 (MT7988), most powerful but not recommended for Wi-Fi due to Wi-Fi NIC issues. 2. GL.iNET Flint 2 (MT7986), currently best supported device for Wi-Fi. 3. BPI-R3 (MT7986), like Flint 2 but with SFP. Flint 2's Wi-Fi will be better though as it is not a dev board. 4. Flint 3 (Qualcomm IPQ 53xx), for Wi-Fi 7. Not open source OpenWrt due to Qualcomm but close enough if you intend on only using hardware offloading. Weaker CPU than Flint 2. 5. Other Qualcomm routers with the [openwrt-ipq fork](https://github.com/qosmio/openwrt-ipq) so you can still use mostly latest open source bits along with the latest closed source bits. See [forum thread here](https://forum.openwrt.org/t/qualcommax-nss-build/148529). No idea about the Wi-Fi 7 stuff though. 6. ASUS ZenWiFi BT8 (MT7988) has a preliminary build [here](https://github.com/dangowrt/owrt-ubi-installer/tree/v1.0.1-bt8) but it's not officially supported as far as I can tell outside of one person working on it. 7. TP-Link BE805, in hopes of future support since it's MT7988 but someone will need to buy the router and figure out a relatively painless install method first. All of these will support hardware NAT at least, and usually PPPoE too. Other types of offloading will probably be difficult outside of OEM builds. Both MTK and Qualcomm NSS support hardware QoS with fq_codel even, but not with the open-source drivers.

The OpenWRT One is decent, I have it for the same reason. But maybe the new Flint router with OpenWRT has an even powerful CPU which would allow you to comfortably run CAKE at gigabit speeds and even run Suricata or an application firewall if it was supported. So here are the models I suggest: 1. **OpenWRT ONE** [https://openwrt.org/toh/openwrt/one](https://openwrt.org/toh/openwrt/one) 2. **Flint 3** [https://www.gl-inet.com/products/gl-be9300/](https://www.gl-inet.com/products/gl-be9300/) 3. **Banana Pi BPI-R4** [https://wiki.banana-pi.org/Banana\_Pi\_BPI-R4](https://wiki.banana-pi.org/Banana_Pi_BPI-R4) The cheapest and nicer for hackers is the OpenWRT One, open hardware, etc. You also support OpenWRT as a project. It is meant to be good for bufferbloat, but I personally would like a bit more of CPU, maybe additional ethernet ports, but I love the device, also you cannot brick it in most scenarios. The BPI-R4 is the next best option if you are looking at something you can own and have it working without caring about what vendors might do. Next best option after the OpenWRT ONE. You can add Wifi 7 support if you want and it will support insane speeds. The Flint 3 a commercial option, very nice as well, you can probably flash OpenWRT but their os typically is based on OpenWRT with customizations and works out of the box for anything you want. Never had one but I heard good things about the Flint 2 when I was deciding what router to buy, I preferred the OpenWRT ONE in the end.

I tried the BE14 on BPI r4, but couldn't get wifi 7 to work. My pixel 9 can only connect to it with wifi 6.

Can confirm the BPI-R4 (with be14 wifi 7 NIC module) is NOT for the faint of heart. I’m still trying to get mine to play nice with max tx transmit. It seems the current Linux driver (mt7995e) has an issue with setting the max allowed transmit power incorrectly (limiting it to 6-7 dB when it should be capable of 23 dB at 5 & 2.4 GHz). There does seem to exist a patch to the driver that fixes it though that I’m going to play around with.

There aren't any. BPI-R4 would be your only guarenteed option right now, and any other Filogic 880 targets as they come out, since it's under development and mt76 drivers are improving.

Brother let me tell you about my Banana Pi-R4! There are lots of good options out there but this one is my choice, the BPI-R4. It’s got a MediaTek MT7988A (Filogic 880) quad-core ARM Corex-A73 processor and 4/8 GB of DDR4 RAM. Two 10 Gb SFP+ ports and four 1 Gb ethernet ports. For additional hardware support it has one M.2 key for 4G/5G/LTE modem and one M.2 key PCIe3.0 1lane for NVME SSD. It also has a dual minPCIe3.0 2lane interface for the BE-14 Wi-Fi expansion card that supports Wi-Fi 7. With the combination of the MT7988A chip, the speeds of DDR4 RAM, 10 Gb SFP ports, and Wi-Fi 7 it boasts as one of the fastest routers available. You can read in more detail of the specs here if you are interested. [https://wiki.banana-pi.org/Banana\_Pi\_BPI-R4](https://wiki.banana-pi.org/Banana_Pi_BPI-R4)

The best router is obviously the Banana-Pi BPI-R4 which is not for noobs but with all the features you get, it beats anything mentioned in this Reddit. Generally a few Google or Duckduckgo searches will get it up in running 100% with OpenWrt and overlay file system for user files and configurations on extroot on 6.5 GB EMMC partition and a working fan. I went to read up in the Wiki, and studied some good tutorials except for the Banana Pi ones and just compiled an image on OpenWrt's firmware selector. I included the kmod for NVMe SSD and packages for EXTROOT support. Flashing was easy as inserting a Micro SD card that was previously prepared with Linux by extracting the compressed image using a simple gzip command piped to dd command Then  I add a QoS based on qosify and CAKE which has evolved from SQM but with adaptive bandwidth (cake-autorate) using eBPF for traffic clasificación and DSCP marking (different). Two files are all you need and I got them off a forum. I just added stuff to it like CDNs and streaming and gaming servers from a list of address and port that were targetted at MikroTik routers with RouterOS. Ironically, those lists are copy pasteable in the main qosify config and is compatible on OpenWrt but so much on RouterOS .  Top that off with a VPN from Zerotier or Wireguard to link other nodes.