I am considering buying one of these as a replacement for my ageing Draytek Vigor 2860ac. There are a number of reasons:
move from DSL to cable which hopefully should happen in a number of months when OpenReach get their finger out
firmware updates are no longer available so its now out of support
known problem working with the SP112 VOIP adapter (which can't be fixed as there is no new firmware)
would like to add 5G SIM function for backup purposes
would like to host a shared drive
At first I discovered the OpenWrt One which would probably suffice, but then also found that Sinovoip also make the Banana BPI-R3 and BPI-R4. There seems to be a confusing array of packages available, which seem to contain a mix of the below in various permutations:
main board
case
cooling fan
wifi board
antennas
M2 drive
SD card
power supply
However, it seems that there is always something missing that one might need. For the last item one might probably get away with re-purposing a 19V laptop supply which would probably be safer than using the supplied Chinese two pronged PSU anyway. One can always get the M2 or SD card separately anyway. The main consideration is whether I will need the WiFi card (and antennas).
There some things I don't quite understand yet:
where does the WiFi board plug in? I see no connector on the main PCB for it?
does 5G support require the WiFi board or is there a separate board for that? I don't see an antenna connector on the main board?
what kind of antenna do I need for 5G and where can I get one?
why does the OpenWrt support table not show WiFi6 support and no 'ax' for the BPI-R4, when the router supports up to WiFi7, whereas, on the other hand, WiFi 6 support is shown for the BPI-R3?
There is not much cost difference between the R3 and the R4, so I figured opting for the R4 would make more sense, but I get the impression that support might be more fully featured on the R3?
Finally, since one can't trust the online store reviews, are both of these routers well supported by OpenWrt and stable, or is support still very much in development?
My current router is presently acting as a DSL modem, firewall and DHCP server. I have a couple of Zyxel M1 WiFi6 routers, installed with OpenWrt, configured as WiFi APs to provide the WiFi. Therefore, its possible that I may not need the WiFi card, although that will depend what is needed to make 5G work. If I have to buy the WiFi card anyway, then it might as well replace the adjacent AP, so if the expenditure is necessary, so be it.
There is another M.2 slot for the 5G modem on the top of the board. I bought a Quectel RM520N-GL with four antenna's on Aliexpress. Works well with 'uqmi'.
I use "4 pieces Quectel YE0001BA 5G Antenne 600-6000 MHz SMA Male/YM0004AA IPX4 MHF4 Pigtail for RM520N-GL RM551E-GL L RM502Q-AE"
Hadn't seen that option yet. Shared drive would be via USB3 I guess, which should definitely be better than the USB2 on the Vigor, but perhaps not as fast as an built-in M2. Still, does seem to check all the boxes as you say, and quite a bit cheaper.
One thing I do like about the Banana BPI-R4 is the ability to add an SFP for a 10Gb network. Not priority, but I do have a 10Gb capable CAT6 cable between the router and the office. Might be interesting to then upgrade the switch for a 10Gb capable one at some point. It would be of little advantage for Internet use since the fibre provision would run at a max of 1Gb anyway, but might allow for faster backups to the shared drive or NAS. Still, its not priority, but a possible future option.
Thank you. That explains a lot. It makes sense now that the wider M2 connection on top is for the M2 modem, which of course, is adjacent to the SIM card slots. This also confirms that an extra item, the 5G modem would be required, but thankfully this does not seem that expensive.
That's interesting to note. Is this down to the hardware, of development of the firmware?
I have one of those somewhere. Also have an FTDI version. I guess that answers the question on the initial firmware download.
I think it might be due to the hardware yes but I am not sure about that either.
It has an sdcard slot. You can just boot the OpenWrt sdcard image from that and then flash to Nand online. Installing to Emmc requires access to the bootloader in my experience. To be honest I just use the sdcard its easy to upgrade, just powerdown, switch scards and powerup again. Easy.
I don't think there is a home budget NAS that has a 10Gbit port anyway. They are usually 1Gbit RJ45 ports, so the 10Gbit capability seems a bit of a gimmick anyway. The only advantage I can see is whether it would help with faster writing of data to the internal M2 drive, and hence faster backups.
from a storage point of view, it shouldn't be very hard to saturate a 10gbit Ethernet interface,
below are two SATA3 SSD drives in RAID0.
if performance increase is linear (it probably isn't), you need two more to (almost) max out 10gbit NIC.
[frollic@atlantis sdf]$ dd if=/dev/zero of=test.img bs=20G count=1 oflag=dsync
0+1 records in
0+1 records out
2147479552 bytes (2.1 GB, 2.0 GiB) copied, 4.58998 s, 468 MB/s
[frollic@atlantis sdf]
same test with three 12TB low RPM drives in a soft RAID5.
[frollic@atlantis hdc]$ dd if=/dev/zero of=test.img bs=20G count=1 oflag=dsync
0+1 records in
0+1 records out
2147479552 bytes (2.1 GB, 2.0 GiB) copied, 11.9573 s, 180 MB/s
I Have a copper 10G SFP. It gets hot. Currently I am not able to use it to the fullest though. Even though it routes the full 10Gb/s, when sending to the router itself I don't get the full 10Gb/s currently (more like 3 to 5 Gb/s). I think that might improve with software updates though.
Someone also suggested the Mikrotik range of routers. Not really explored these yet, but they do seem rather more expensive. Still, an R4 would likely cost over 300GBP all in.
I think going the BPI R4 route is still a bit of an experiment - Sinovoip sells it as "development board", so if you are more or less tech savvy, it might be a possibility. I also like the SFP ports, because I have fiber to connect all devices.
There are some pain-points, which "might" be fixed by software in the future or not (because it could be hardware related):
High receiving noise level: The WIFI card is not very sensitive, you generally see noise level in the -78 dBm range (as reference just look at the printout from @kcinimod above, where the reported noise level is -77 dBm - most commercial routers are in the -90 to -95 dBm range) → this hurts the WiFi performance when you move your client away from the access point. So range is not very good. There is some software workaround which increases the noise level by 5 dBm and perhaps some shielding or getting rid of the metal case might help further, but the culprit / root cause of the problem is not known yet. There are some discussions here and here
There is also some sending issues on some WiFi cards, where the transmit power is limited to 6 dBm (instead of 23 dBm) - for this some software workarounds exist (as discussed here)
So in current 24.10.0 release of OpenWrt no fix for the problems above are included yet. There exists some alternative firmwares, which have solved the tx-problem, but as said, you need to do additional work and know where/how to find the alternative OpenWrt firmware and how to install additional packages if needed.
For the noise problem there is no real fix so far, so it might never be solved or someone finds a hardware mod - or you have a smaller house/apartment and range is no problem.
EDIT: If you don't need Wifi Card, BPI R4 looks like a good device. But if you need the Wifi card, the problems above could be a show stopper...
The noise issue is an interesting one. Since the antennas are external I am not sure how getting rid of the metal case might help, but certainly a 20dBm difference is significant. The Tx difference is also quite significant. I wonder whether its down to routing of tracks on the board? Whatever the problem is, I can appreciate it might not be the best way to go.
However, 5G support is provided via a separate board and I might be able to get away without WiFi support for now so maybe its still an option. Will have to give it some thought. Thanks for your post.
The problem with noise is not yet fully understood - but the current way of thinking is, that it might be emitted on the board itself (e.g. non optimal voltage switching circuit).
For tx-problem: this does not affect all Wifi-cards, but it seems those affected have a bad eeprom programming (someone explained: during quality testing, the boards are flashed with a special eeprom, and they forgot to re-flash it afterwards. The software workaround is: instead of reading the max-power values from eeprom, it is feed with values from the driver eeprom) - as said, this problem is basically solved, only problem: it is not included in 24.10 - and it looks like maintainer do not want to include it, as it should be fixed/added in upstream linux/driver part, if I understood correctly
