When Banana Pi started to sell the low-cost Banana Pi BPI-WiFi 6 router board powered by Triductor TR6560 dual-core SoC and TR5220 WiFi 6 chipset, I mentioned they should probably offer a complete system with enclosure and antennas for this to become more popular.
It took a while, or about nine months to be precise, but the Banana Pi BPI-WiFi 6 router is now available with a plastic enclosure, four external antennas, an Ethernet cable, and a power supply for $30.90 plus shipping on Aliexpress.
Banana Pi BPI-WiFi 6 router specifications:
- SoC – Triductor TR6560 dual-core Arm Cortex-A9 processor @ 1.2 GHz with LSW (Line-Card Switching) and hardware NAT up to 5 Gbps
- WiFi chipset – Triductor TR5220 WiFi 6 chipset
- System Memory – 512 MB DDR3
- Storage – 128MB SPI NAND flash
- Networking
- 1x Gigabit Ethernet WAN port with optional PoE support
- 3x Gigabit Ethernet LAN ports
- 2.4 GHz WiFi 6 (802.11ax) 2×2 MIMO up to 573.5 Mbps
- 5 GHz WiFi 6 (802.11ax) 2×2 MIMO up to 2401.9 Mbps
- 4x external antennas
- WiFi supports AP and STA modules, WPA, WPA2, WPA3 security
- Debugging – 6-pin debug UART header
- Misc – Power button, Reset button, WPS button, 9x LEDs
- Power Supply – 12V DC via power barrel jack
- Dimensions – SBC: 137 x 107 mm; router: TBD
The hardware is mostly the same, but the company decided to remove one of the LAN ports, so the Banana Pi BPI-WiFi 6 router comes with three LAN ports instead of four. The router runs a fork of OpenWrt with Linux 5.10, and they released the OpenWrt source code about six months ago and further updated it two months ago to the latest “RC8 SDK” which must be an internal version for Triductor SoCs. You’ll find the code and instructions to build it on an Ubuntu 22.04 machine on GitHub. The Wiki has a few more details about the hardware and binary images.
You may also want to check out the issues there with one thread asking for upstreaming support, which is unlikely to happen since unless I’ve missed it we’ve not seen any code for Triductor SoCs in mainline. The second issue talks about a limitation of the router with WDS mode and Monitor mode not being supported.
Putting aside software support, $30 is a pretty good deal for a WiFi 6 AX3000 router, but it’s also possible to go lower with something like the Xiaomi Router AX1500 selling for $25 at half the maximum link speed.
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
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