I've been on the lookout for a 6E wifi router compatible with OpenWRT, and see support for something called a "Telenor branded Zyxel EX5700" was merged:
I see no mention of EX5700 on Zyxel's website, but went looking for the Telenor one - this appears to be it:
So far as I understand that's a Norwegian ISP, so I doubt I can get that (at least for a reasonable price) here in UK.
Does anyone know any other ways to get this router, or something with the same underlying hardware please?
depends on what you mean by underlying hardware, here's what's supported by the filogic target, used by the EX5700 - https://downloads.openwrt.org/snapshots/targets/mediatek/filogic/
not the same device, but the (only) other alternative with 6 GHz support so far.
Thanks - that's a really helpful list. I was trying, and failing, to use the hardware compatibility pages.
I think upon further reading, I'm better off going an OrangePI route (or even Proxmox on x86) + Filogic Wifi card.
EDIT - I see though that doesn't necessarily mean 6E (6GHz), which is what I'm really looking for.
Thanks - bit pricey here in the UK at £300.
nope, this is based on the SoC used in the device, not the wifi capabilities (if any).
I see, thanks.
Don't know where you can get one unfortunately. Have been meaning to create a device page for this thing. Don't known when that will happen. But let me put some info in this thread at least.
The Telenor "Wifi Ruter II" board is a ZyXEL EX5700-T0. This is part of their ISP offering, which I believe includes many more variants than the examples at https://service-provider.zyxel.com/emea/en/products/ethernet-cpe indicates. Model numbers are not necessarily useful in any case. These routers are always(?) made to customer spec.
The Telenor variant is extra weird. It has a Telenor designed case. And it runs non-ZyXEL firmware, including the bootloader. Which is why I decided to flag the supported device as "Telenor". It includes workarounds for a couple of bootloader features which probably aren't necessary with a ZyXEL bootloader. But hopefully not harmful.
I was gonna wait till wifi7 to retire my Netgear R7800 but these are now starting to become available in the markedplace as used/new in box. Asking price seems to be about 90usd. Looking forward to gettting a few of these and run 160mhz ax on a empty (for now) non-dfs 6hhz spectrum 
@bmork Hello,
I recently purchased an EX5700-T0 bare board. After booting into the system, I found that the 'u-boot-env' and 'Factory' partitions are empty. I am unsure if these partitions are supposed to be empty on your device. If they are not, could you please share a backup of all your partitions?
Thank you!
u-boot-env is empty. If your device has the Telenor modified u-boot then there is no persistent environment. The boot loader and OS exchange some environment state using a reserved memory.region, which is why I had to create the ubootenv-nvram driver. The only interesting part is the "uboot_bootcount". It must be reset to 0 on sucessful boot to prevent U-Boot from booting into rescue mode.
The Factory partitions contains some wifi eeprom data. I've put a gzipped copy of mine on https://www.mork.no/~bjorn/xx/ex5700-factory.gz
I downloaded the file, but I can't gunzip it. Can you check if the linked file is correct? I used a binary software to inspect the file, and it seems to be empty.
works for me
bjorn@miraculix:~$ curl --silent https://www.mork.no/~bjorn/xx/ex5700-factory.gz|zcat|hexdump -C -n16
00000000 86 79 03 00 00 0c 43 26 60 90 00 00 00 00 00 00 |.y....C&`.......|
00000010
Sorry for my poor skills. I downloaded the file with Chrome or IDM, and the file seems to be incorrect. I downloaded the file with the command wget, and the file is correct.
Thanks for your help!
Hi, I downloaded your copy. However, it seems a lot is missing in that , according to https://github.com/openwrt/mt76/blob/master/mt7915/eeprom.h. Can you tell me where to find a correct copy of MT7916_ePAeLNA_EEPROM.bin? My device complains that it can not find the file, and the signal quality is quite poor because of that, I suppose.
that file is part of the OEM firmware. Not relevant to OpenWrt and not something I can give you. But you should be able to extract it from the original firmware if required
Then, where is that eeprom located on ex5700, should it be located in factory block? From eeprom.c, it seems eeprom could be read from mtd. As for https://github.com/openwrt/openwrt/blob/main/target/linux/mediatek/dts/mt7986a-zyxel-ex5700-telenor.dts, the file seems to point location of eeprom to certain area of factory block. But when I look at the factory backup you shared, for the eeprom of mt7986, at locations pointed by dts file, aside from CHIP_ID and MAC_ADDR, it is mostly repeating "00"s. Could you tell me what I am missing here? Thx in advance.
My mistake, EEPROM of MT7916 seems OK, however, I am still wrapping my head around why EEPROM of MT7986 in the factory backup you shared seems to miss some critical parts.
when you extract ubi backup, you may find the vendor calibrated mt7986 eeprom is located in img-1675684845_vol-rootfs-rescue.ubifs/lib/firmware/MT7986_ePAeLNA_EEPROM_AX7800.bin, you can merge it into the ex5700-factory.bin backup and flash it back to your spi-nand.
I tried
mount -t ubifs /dev/ubi0_3 /mnt/ubifs3
it gave me
/mnt/ubifs3: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/ubi0_3, missing codepage or helper program, or other error.
Could you tell me how to extract ubi backup without breaking a sweat?
Thx.