Does anyone have some information about the hardware used in the UniFi 7 Lite? I would love to see OpenWRT support in the future, as this is a pretty decent, low-priced dualband access point with 802.11be support. Also compared to most Wifi 7 devices on the market it just has a maximal power consumption of 13W, so it can be driven by PoE (802.3af). Here's the product page of the access point.
I guess it will be something Qualcomm based inside, as in most Ubiquiti access points, and it will most likely take time to add support for those.
I had another look at the topics in the forum and found this post. So according to this post, it would be the ipq53xx. It's not supported yet, I guess. The only thing I'm seeing is this patch and the whole discussion here is pretty much the answer to my question:
IMHO there isn't much Wifi 7 value left when they have to drop the 6 GHz radio to get the size, price and power comsumption down.
And you still get a slightly larger AP consuming 50% more power compared to a U6+. The advantages of the U7 Lite is a very theoretical (noise free 240 MHz channels, anyone?) bandwith improvement on 5 GHz, and a 2.5 Gbps ethernet port. The most noticable effect of the latter is that the PoE switch becomes more expensive. Unless you run it on 1Gbps since there wasn't any point anyway.
Did I mention that the U6+ works perfectly with OpenWrt?
There's something else that Qualcomm are doing that's a bit bewildering.
The Qualcomm forked SDK is producing 32 bit builds, so there's all these WiFi 7 devices being released cheap with chipsets and CPUs that are 64 bit capable, but Qualcomm is producing 32 bit software for the drivers and the operating system.
As bmork implied, 5+6 GHz MLO can be a game changer, but loses pretty much all appeal without a 6 GHz radio.
Clients doing 2.4+5 GHz MLO are rare and the results not all that convincing so far, while that might change in the future -with better hardware/firmware/driver support-, we are far from that so far; and OpenWrt can't do MLO at all so far. It's just too early for that so far, both on the target support- and driver (MLO!) support stage.
Ok, that sounds interesting even if it is a quite similar dualband device. However, Mediatek is surely more promising than Qualcomm. Was there already a discussion about the U7 LR or just the MT7987? I didn't find any topics or posts about the device.