802.11ax Routers

Anybody spotted a cheapish IPQ807X or IPQ60xx based routers?
I would really love to work on ax gear, but the prices are insane

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Msg when you find something

https://www.cnx-software.com/2020/02/14/xiaomi-aiot-router-ax3600-wifi-6-router-sells-for-135/ (IPQ8071A) is probably the 'cheapest' option at this moment.

Yeah, but they are pretty much unavailable and there is no GPL, so really bad.

Well codeaurora repo have ipq807x source... So only device gpl is missing

I know, but since this is a completely new platform guessing all of the pins/etc and device specifics without GPL would be damn hard

as the platform is pretty new, they should now provide sdk with newer kernel (instead of acient 3.18)
If we are lucky, they could have finally switched to dts use. This + /proc/devicetree and porting shouldn't be that difficult...

It's fully DTS like IPQ40xx was, only IPQ806x was not.
The kernel was most likely bumped to 4.1 or 4.4 but I doubt it got newer than that.
Also, the platform is heavily upstreamed by QCA, but I would not like to be the one adding a new board without its GPL.
I know what pain it is to figure out various workarounds vendors use without it

This thread is going to be a slow burn until 2021 when the hardware starts really rolling in and AX gets closer to becoming the household standard.

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Well, all we need is a first relatively affordable router.
Because without it there will be no development, as I nor others really dont have 400-600 EUR for a device that might get bricked hardly.

And the wait for that affordable router plus major progress on development won't happen until 2021.

I found very cheap Wifi 6 router from Aliexpress - TP-Link TL-XDR3020.
It's based on Intel chipset.


OEM site: https://www.tp-link.com.cn/product_1494.html?t=index

Firstly I wanted to buy this router for daily driver, but then I realized that I can't trust Chinese stock firmware.
Maybe OpenWRT could support intel chipset soon?

Very unlikely.
There currently is no support for the GRX500 lantiq/ mips SOC, getting that working will take significant time and effort.
Given the precedent for lantiq WAVE300 wireless (proprietary, ancient, hard to get/ keep working, not supported on OpenWrt), I wouldn't be overly optimistic for WAV654A0 either.

https://www.gizmochina.com/2020/04/07/redmi-wi-fi-6-router-coming-soon/ Xiaomi is working on cheaper ax router. Maybe this one will be on Qualcomm.

The latest possible contender for best value: https://www.tp-link.com/us/home-networking/wifi-router/archer-ax20/

That one is broadcom, so chances are slim to none.
Check the datasheets before linking them.

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https://www.dlink.com/en/products/dir-x1860-exo-ax-ax1800-wi-fi-6-router
It seems to use MT7621 soc + MT7915 wifi.

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I see mt76 patches mentioning mt7915 as well :slight_smile:

Hopefully there's no locked bootloader.

My opinion:

Don't expect stable driver for mt7915 in next years - examples of mt7612 (developed for over 5 years inside mt76), mt7603/mt7628 mt7615 show, that even if mt76 drivers are created from scratch, a lot of issues are with them.

Things could go better, but the more progress and bugfixes are commited, even more regressions can be observed - look at tickets on mt76 github project. I think too little people work on this project.

Code of mediatek drivers look definitely worse, but these drivers are actually stable.

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Xiaomi released new, cheaper router.
"AX1800 uses a Qualcomm 5-core enterprise chip (4-core A53 1.2GHz + independent NPU) IPQ6000, 256MB RAM, 128MB ROM, 1 gigabit WAN port and 3 gigabit LAN ports."
Maybe this one will be good for openwrt?
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