Well...One less thing I have to worry about...Since it's not available for shipping to the U.S. (currently). If they honor those Earlybird prices when and if it does get an exemption then I'll think about it...But not at $369.99...It would have to be at those prices.
I bought one out of curiosity for the "Super Early Bird" price tag. They honor it. But the 500 units were sold out fast (~15 mins.). While the "Early Bird" with 800 units still exists. Its not so attractive anymore. If you buy at 290. You can wait for release also and see how the device is doing and prop. wait for first sell off also.
I would agree its pricy for what you get. It should be in range of 200-250 EUR. But given that they do often flash sales I think you can get it for this price in future sales.
For me esp. the wifi part is a bit like "casual" compared to the ethernet part. They could have done 4x4 for all bands. ;D But its positioned between casual and enterprise gear. So they made a tradeoff. And if you look around there are not so much A73 powered Mediatek routers. There are lot more Qcom devices for much lower prices you could grab (e.g. a Mercusys mr47be for ~ 120-150 EUR). But you loose things like: sfp and some ethernet ports or OpenWrt or USB etc. All depends on needs. This is a try of an "AIO" device for enthuisasts/homelab users were the market will determine if its worth to pay this extra money for not messing around with anything like:
You could get away with the roughly (not exactly but nearly) the same amount of money if you buy a n150 mini pc (cwwk with sfp), a w1700k (as backhaul) and 2,5G (with an sfp port if its enough) switch for ~ 350-500 EUR (ofc the RAM) and getting better wifi and cpu performance. The question is (esp. for the w1700k): Do you actually need 4x4 for eg. 10-20 wifi clients and how much work you want to put into it getting it running. And if you pay ~500 EUR you could also go for used enterprise gear. Big advantage of this setup is you can run anything on x86 and put OpenWrt into a VM. But you need a usecase for this setup.
Its a tradeoff. Personally I run a n150 for like 2 years now (before I used an i3 laptop (kaby lake) with defect display). it consumed 2 watts more on idle then the n150 now running with ~5-7w. with 3 wifi routers connected to it. i will see if its worth to replace this setup. prop. not if i see the spec wattage ~25W-45W(with USB). But I think it can be much less if you dont use copper 10g port nor USB. So i predict ~10w idle. Will see.
Not that anyone really needs it, but it'd be interesting to see if MLO is correctly enabled and actually works and lives up to the marketing hype. Unless you need a super powerful access point, or maybe it's your primary router. Not sure what the draw is for this device, particularly at its price point.
Well, I could do tests. But then I would really need to know what exactly I have to test resp. how the setup has to look like (configuration, devices) and what I do have to "meassure" with using proper tools/progs. I dont know how to see which channels are actually used for datatransmission in real time. I would just see if a device is connected to eg. two channles if the Flint OpenWrt fork would show it within GUI. Beside that I never used Flint OpenWrt fork. So no clue what I actually can do with it.
For testing I have actually 2 smartphones with wifi 7 support (1 Snapdragon and 1 Exynos) and a Intel Laptop with BE201. I have another device with a Mediatek Wifi 7 chip also (dont remember its name).
Personally I doubt that they've found the holy grail regarding MLO. I think we will see it improved with "Wave2/Gen2" devices earliest. But who knows.
wifi7 "Rel 2" = wifi8. mt7999 will be out in <6 months.
(https://fccid.io/RASFILOGIC8800)
MediaTek Blackhawk WiFi8 Access Point
| FCC ID | RAS-FILOGIC8800 |
Has anyone ever tried a m.2 mt7995/6?
Asiarf offers an MT7995 for ~100$. Pcie adapter is ~35$.
Would be a lot cheaper than a Flint 4. Antenna power is most likely customizable, which is a big pro. Antennas are modular aswell...
Well this was just speculation.
But my impression is that wifi development has stalled a bit lately. So I think (I could be totally wrong on this) that wifi8 will be high end for a longer time as wifi7 was/is. And we could see small wifi7 improvements over time. Simple because as far as I understood these (MLO) problems are firmware/software related and not hardware related. Maybe the 880 falls into this category already?
Beside that. They will annouce this on CES 2027 prop. and you will see products around April/May 2027 earliest for ~ 600-700EUR like early Wifi7 devices. First Smartphones with Wifi8 will prop. emerge short before or same timerange (high end only). So timeline for wifi7 was 2023 early routers some with some chipsets announced. 2025 wifi 7 was "mainstream" in smartphones. This time aroud I bet against this timeline. Simple bc. Wifi8 has not really new things to offer. This leads often to longer procduct cycles bc. manufacturer are in no rush/no pressure.
Why? IMHO the most important step-ups in WiFi7 are mandatory trigger frame uplink OFDMA and uplink slot RU scheduling by the AP, and these exist already.
Wifi8 is nothing more than Wifi7 Rel 2 + software. Manufacturers love wifi8 because users must upgrade everything to wifi8 to gain the benefits. Makes for an easy marketing checkbox on a retail box and a quick way to memory hole the terrible wifi7 adoption/marketing.
My point of view is there is no pressure for ppl. having wifi7 to change horses bc. nothing new (just smaller improvments) same for the manufacturer. So wifi8 will coexist with wifi7 for longer and wifi8 will be just a new premium for a longer while. Simply bc. there is no "killer-feature" ahead what they can sell as a "must have" to get the ppl. to buy new. So for someone buying new will question the benefit of the higher price for wifi8 if its almost the same featureset and buy cheaper which means we will still see "new" wifi7 routers (with maybe better firmware). But that's just my opinion. We will see what happens with the market.
Thank you for the link!
It prompted me to ask another question:
Testing wireless devices for throughput has always been dubious due to the nature of how signals can be interfered with. My point is unless you have some kind of a NAS or some other use case where you need super stable and super fast, I don't understand the point of MLO.
On my MT6000 with the 2.5 GbE port as an uplink to my router/firewall, an iphone 16 gets crazy fast iperf3 results. Why would you need better is my point.
Famous last words, “640K ought to be enough for anybody.”
You might not need it now but the future, as always, is uncertain.
You can’t predict the future, but you can recognize diminishing returns. Wi-Fi 6 and stable hardware (eg MT6000) already provides more bandwidth >99% of users can meaningfully use. Buying Wi-Fi 7 for marketing promises of more bandwidth isn't "future-proofing" so much as paying way extra for a problem that doesn't exist with hardware that’ll be obsolete before you need it.
Future-proof the stuff in your walls (eg runs) is my suggestion... way better ROI there.
I agree testing wifi i challenging. Esp. the environment has a huge impact on any meassurement Concrete (walls in general), other routers/device around, channel selection, etc.
So for a client those numbers are indeed absurd (eg. for a smartphone). For a laptop/minipc workstation its not.
Almost all high-end wifi chips (snapdragon 8 elite+, intel b201+) deliver a rate ~5,8 Gbps (with 320Mhz width). A Iphone16/17 or Mediathek devices are capped to 160MHz/~2,4Gbps. In practice you end up for the 5,8Gbps resp. 2,4Gbps at a rate somewhat between 3,5-5Gbps resp. 1,4-2,1Gbps (depending on environment).
So the 160MHz width is the sweet spot for 6G nowdays using a 2,5 Gbps lan. The higher width capable end devices are show horses where the future is heading. As so often: No network nerd would need that.
But for a "normal/casual" client those speeds are not so important but for the router they are. Eg. three devices consuming 1Gbps (download some stuff, streaming) succeed a 2,5G lan.
What I want to say: The usecase matters a lot. That is the main driver/reason why MLO matters.
Eg. I have a lot other routers around me despite im living in rual area. Eg. there are 8 routers claming channel 11 on 2,4GHz band. While we just have 1,6 and 11 as "ideal" channels available. For 5G its a bit better. But I have DFS events here and I can see that most routers using the two lower 80MHz wide bands available. Bc. they are to lazy to switch back resp. choosing lower frequencies for end-device compatibility. But I must say that I do the same due to the DFS fk (we have big radar stations here). Its bs if you have teams running or doing wifi calls.
That brought me to think about 6G resp. using a tri-band device. So my laptop/smartphones can use more then one band (5G and 6G) simultanly to get consitent speeds and a more reliable connection. Given that I'm surrounded with concrete and walls I hope I can ditch one of my three wifi routers and have better Wifi Calling quality while I'm roaming around in my flat/homeoffice. So MLO is giving me parts of 5G band and parts of 6G band which helps esp. in crowded areas like mine.
Clients that need and can actually use such speeds, would be wired. If your workstation can handle 5Gbps, it can handle +25Gbps.
The use case for regular people is still capped by their WAN which sadly is still likely barely even 1Gbps. Three devices = 333Mbps/client.
Reliability and roaming fixes are found in wifi8:
Will wifi8 be a complete bust like wifi7? Unknown.
Hmm ... I live in a different reality then you. I know whole departments relying on wifi only to connect thin/clients. Where dozens of those wifi devices like a w1700k making a lot of sense. There whole fkn windows profiles are synced via wifi. Which succeeds for a lot of them gigabytes on data. I know even factories where the whole automation is done via wifi (with like 300-500 clients). You just reduce the amount of bandwidth needed to one device. Speed matters for those clients/workstations also!
A normal workstation does not need to be connected via cable nowdays. Personally I cannot and will not cable my whole flat just for my homeoffice. If you have your own house you can do that. But its often not worth the work and I know a lot of ppl. just using wifi routers to connect their family members to the internet.
You justify a technology where an enddevices are "overpowerd" for usage in connection with another technology (internet access) which cannot keep pace with it (fiber rollout is slow and expensive). And you do the same with wifi/lan speed.
Given this comment. In reality a dumb Smartphone does not need soley thoses speeds for a bit surfing and streaming. You would need those higher WAN speeds for a family or company for more then one client. But you could also need those speeds for your (w)lan itself. Even my crappy HDD NAS delivers ~270MB/s which is enough to hit the max of a 2,5G lan. So making a simple backup can hit all others in lan just streaming and surfing if one device is consuming bandwidth.
I live here in Germany. 1Gbps is out of reach here at my location. But if I look at some friends in Sweden, Netherlands and Poland there are those speeds reality. Thats why this all exists not just for those living in eg Germany, Switzerland or Austria. Here we dont even get symmetric internet.
The reality is the Flint 4 has SFP+, 10G, 4x2.5G, and 4x1G ports. It's your prerogative to buy a Flint 4, refuse to run wires, and restrict yourself to only wireless only.
Y, 10g is fine for me. Its for the omada. Where one of its 10g ports will be connected to the Flint4 and the other one to another router/AP. I'm fully aware that this is oversized for my needs. My network is still 2,5g (with just 3 devices able to consume it). I dont really need this device for 10g. I dont have a home network running 10g traffic constantly over a switch. So I agree on your point that its a bit of waste. I have more wifi clients around here nowdays then in the past.
But its not all about the huge numbers. I have to use OpenVPN to connect to my company. I have wireguard VPNs running also. I want to have BE wifi bc. I have clients able to use it. I want to remove OpenWrt from one of my n150 from running 24/7 bc. I dont really need my NAS including all the services I need for work running through the night. I expect that the flint4 has enough power to service OpenVPN and wireguard (at least for my connection speed).
I'm also aware that MLO is potentially broken (I'm new to this topic). So I don't expect much. I have to figure out myself whats going on. I'm pretty sure that its implementation is dependent on clients also. I could even imagine (carefull this is just half knowledge) that it is entirely up to the enddevice/client to decide what to do with three available wifi bands. It would make sense like for roaming in general. So I expect that its never working reliable accross the board for a long time bc. all Smartphone/Laptop manufacturers cooking their own soup while powermgmt is often the driving factor esp. on Smartphones to favor runtime over speed. Despite that: As far as I understood it is MLO not for speed and more for reliability in crowded areas. So I would expect that in a less crowded area that a device prefers not to use MLO at all bc. signals are good. So it would be hard to proof that MLO is working or not. Maybe someone with more knowledge correct me on this. I would appriciate it.