Hi, I am finding a wifi card that support 802.11ax in ap mode.
But after some research on the forum, It seems the only card will work is MediaTek's cards like MT792X (MT7921K/MT7922/etc) now.
Is it true or there's another options to work with WiFi 6? As the performance of MediaTek's cards are not ideal by some user's feedbacks.
If there's another cards, then which of them has the best performance? If no, please suggest the an AC wifi card, ideally with specific model number.
Or if you have other opinion, please feel free to comment and suggest together, thank you!
Another version of this card is made by wallystech and is much cheaper. I have it and use it for my home network and it works just fine.
￡21.74 | Wallys/industrial 2×2.4GHz 2x5GHz MT7915 MT7975 MiniPCIe Module 2T2R Network Card DR7915 WiFi6 https://a.aliexpress.com/_mNeaGfY
These cards do not support 160Mhz channel width though as they have 2T2R for each frequency when operating in DBDC mode (dual concurrent) (5g and 2.4g)
If you only need 5g mode, you can get this one
It needs 4 antennas and supports 160Mhz channel width, up to 2400 mbit/s speeds
Does this Wallys wifi card from Aliexpress support DBDC and allows simultaneous use for 2.4 and 5 GHz ?
I can not find this information from the specifications.
Yes, I am using it with both frequencies simultaneously. Only thing to consider is that it is somehow thick on the bottom side, it has some plastic cover that makes it impossible to mount it horizontally on some motherboards/adapters that have screw mounts for half length cards. You can still plug it into the mini pcie slot but it will stay a bit tilted
Slightly below 500 Mbit/s for 5ghz on 80Mhz width with one wall in between. For 2.4Ghz I don't know and it doesn't matter to me as it is only used by smarthome devices.
In the Aliexpress review someone mentions the lack of WPA3 support. Can you confirm that this is true? Or does the card support WPA3? And what about simultaneous WPA2/WPA3
Yes it does, WPA3 requires 802.11w support. If it is not supported by the card and driver hardware encryption needs to be disabled in favor for software encryption (if implemented) which comes with performance panalties see: here
No, disabling hardware encryption on the card means the CPU needs to do all encryption which leads to a performance impact and thus a lower speed. This is not preferred and that's why I asked the question if the card worked with WPA3 (out of the box).
ath10k/ ath11k or mt76 based cards shouldn't have any problems with 802.11w (and in extension WPA3), those are the only viable choices for AP mode anyways. …and only the very oldest ath9k based cards (<AR9170) won't do 802.11w in hardware, covering the 2.4 GHz band (AR92xx or newer) as well.
Apart from this, I still favour external (OpenWrt supported-) APs to cover the wireless side with x86_64 based routers, as those tend to be cheaper and more capable (and reduce the problems of sourcing good pigtails, antennas and mounting them in a sane way for maximum range, Mu-MIMO and beamforming to work best).
Thanks for this detailed answer , this is an answer on my question.
Apart from this, I still favour external (OpenWrt supported-) APs to cover the wireless side with x86_64 based routers, as those tend to be cheaper and more capable
I can agree on that, but I do also like the versatility of x86_64 hardware. In this particular case my hardware is equipped with 2GB ram and SD card slot, so probably supported for quite some while and when bricked I can easily re-flash the SD card.
I've received a couple of these Wallys DR7915 mPCIe cards and they seem to work fine, support for WPA3 is indeed working. With both radios enabled and set to 20dBm the temperature remains acceptable at 55°C (19°C ambient). So thanks for the suggestion @mehditlili
, this is an answer on my question.