good news , we have finished BPI-BE1900 wifi7 Module design
how many antennas does that have?
it have 14 antennas on BE1900
Good to see it finally made it to production. Do you have preliminary figures for radio noise? Or, at least, is it supposed to be better than the BE14 in this regard?
Iām ready to order
How about the power consumption?
In compare to be14 too.
I asked ChatGPT this question:
It gave me this table:
Is that right?
If thatās correct, an average single-family household would only need this during party situations.
I looked at the page of GL.inet. The ābigā router is the Flint 3 GL-BE9300 and small one is Slate 7 GL-BE3600. I think this is a good orientation ⦠(sadly it is Qualcomm based)
Thatās why Iām interested in the power consumption. If the BE19 didnāt consume more power at idle than the AW7990, Iād be on board! But I guess this train is leaving without me.
Nevertheless this does not mean that some people canāt have fun with it!
Whatās the max radio power per band? (dbm)
I have two wireless APs at home, one in the middle of the house and one near the balcony.
In the middle of the house, in addition to the WiFi AP, there are also an VDSL, a SFP+ Switch, an x79 host(pve1), an x99 host(pve2), and an NAT host (Intel N3350 with 1Gb Ethernet & 1Gb SFP).
There is an IPCam outside the door of the house, which is connected to the WiFi AP in the middle of the house. Currently, the two WiFi APs uses TP-Link C7(V4 & V5).
I have a dream.
I hope that both WiFi APs will use SFP+ to provide WiFi 7, the NAT Host connect to the Switch with SFP+, and add a new Nvme SSD NAS(Nvme SSD & SSD on x79 host now).
I hope that the NAT host can collect the client connection information of the WiFi AP and the port information of the switch.
I hope BPI-R4 can become the next generation infrastructure services platform, butā¦
Currently, I put BPI-R4 + BE14 in the same location, and its signal strength cannot reach outside the door.
I used my phone to connect to the BPI-R4 + BE14ās WiFi to watch LangLive(Taiwanese version of TikTok), but the WiFi will disconnect and the screen froze.
Currently, my laptop uses Debian 12 with RTL8852CE PCIe 802.11ax, and NetworkManager(1.42.0) does not seem to support 6GHz yet.
I hope that BPI-R4 will be strong and stable enough to realize my dream step by step.
I hope the BE19000 signal strength and stability can be better, and I also hope the BPI-R4 PRO is not too expensive.
Before I gave up on BPi and listed my entire set of routers on the second-hand market, I decided to take one last lookā¦
So ā good to see thereās finally been some progress, after two years since the BPi R4.
Once itās released, what kind of performance can we realistically expect? The BPi R4 and BE14 had issues in so many areas ā most of the time, they couldnāt even outperform a basic 7981 AX3000 router in terms of speed and stability. Have there been any real improvements this time, both in SOFTWARE and HARDWARE?
Itās also worth noting that other vendors have already mastered WiFi 7 ā this isnāt some cutting-edge, experimental tech anymore.
As shown in the videos below:
A consumer-grade H3C WiFi 7 router achieved over 1 km of coverage ā and that was on 5GHz, not 2.4GHz ā back in 2023!
So Thereās no excuse for releasing any unstable hardware or half-baked software in 2025 .
Hope BE19 perform better than BE14, at least better than my ax3000 routerā¦
Looking forward to seeing your final product.
So Thereās no excuse for releasing any unstable hardware or half-baked software in 2025
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This is a development board, not a fully fledged, finished router from a multi-million $ company. I can understand frustration, but if you look for something like i just mentioned, you are probably very wrong here. Also wondering why you not go with such a router like you mentioned, when it fits your needs much better.
I just mean, the success of countless other vendors ā big and small, including GL.iNet (not a multi-million $ company) and other 20$ WiFi7 Router vender ā clearly proves one thing: Qualcomm, MediaTek, and Broadcom have already baked their WiāFi 7 solution and provided their partners with hardware and software reference designs that actually works well, 2 years ago.
The answers are out there. The homework has already been done. And yet, somehow, SinoVoip still manages to fail at even copying the solution.
I can confidently say this board has wasted a lot of time for real developers ā people who genuinely wanted to build something on top of it.
Instead, weāve been stuck build & flashing different firmware builds over and over, just trying to get the (200$) board into a usable state. Weāve spent hours & days digging into why AX Wi-Fi performance collapses at just 1ā3 meters, or why Wi-Fi 7 still doesnāt work at all ā not due to our fault, but because the platform itself is broken.
These are not problems the community should be solving. This is the vendorās job. SinoVoip is treating this like a handoff project ā build the hardware, dump some incomplete code, broken firmware (with no update for more than a year) and walk away, hoping the community will fix what they couldnāt.
Thatās not how a responsible hardware company operates. Thatās not how to treat developers.
To be honest, before using this board, I had never even thought about how PCIe ASPM could affect WiāFi signal noise.
Thatās the kind of low-level hardware behavior developers shouldnāt have to worry about ā it should have been addressed in the design phase by the vendor.
If the BE14 was a compromised, transitional attempt, then the BE19 represents what the BPI-R4 was originally advertised to be capable of.
If they mess this one up too, I honestly donāt know how any developer will be able to trust SinoVoipās products moving forward.
not sure what you try to achieve. this is a developer board afaik, so it is clear that this wont be ready in the next weeks or months. also, writing software, especially when the vendor does not open the source (classic MTK china problem), there is no way except reverse engineering which takes a lot of effort. did all went well with sinovoip? for sure not. i am sure they made many mistakes and things that could be done better. but this is not the right place for this, especially if its not constructive critic. write them an email. otherwise, its just wasted time. just because some vendor created a wifi 7 card, doesnt mean it works. wifi 7 is so new that there is not that much hardware out there that works with that. for example wifi 7 usb adapters. again: if you have other vendors that produce those great pieces of hardware, why dont u go with them?
btw my wifi 7 works like a charm. its not the best performance, but absolutely enough (did not do a measurement but the 2.3gb lineageos was downloaded in a couple of seconds). and i sit about 7 meters away from the router. if you need something with more oomph, maybe go with a unify AP or soā¦
made a short measurement: wifi 2.4ghz: 80mbit (yeah, thats badā¦), ax on 5ghz 480-500mbit and wifi 7 on 6ghz about 800mbit, but the test stopped then, not sure if it would raise more or not. same location, tested with my mobile phone about 7 meters away from the router with some obstacles in way.
I understand your frustration! There has been some discussion suggesting that the R4 board itself might be causing the noise issues with the BE14. If the BE19 doesnāt have special filters for that⦠wonāt the situation be the same?
Every problem I find on the R4 is fascinating in a way. But then I remember: I bought this board with money ā and I donāt have much of that! Every hardware bug or limitation caused by the board makes me take a deep breath. But compared to other devices, you get a flexible platform where I decide which components to use. Still, the hardware has to work reliably.
About the software development timeline for the router and Wi-Fi 7: I think itās really difficult to make clear statements about this.
To be honest, I didnāt care much about Banana Piās OpenWrt version. I donāt think its purpose is to run the board at 100%. I see it more like a father holding a child during their first attempts to ride a bike.
Itās not fair to compare official OpenWrt with commercial vendor firmware. Yes, I also expected Wi-Fi 7 to work earlier on OpenWrt ā but these people arenāt being paid for their work!
In the end, thereās nothing wrong with the current software development pace. Itās a completely new generation of Wi-Fi⦠and as far as I can tell, everyone in the open-source world is working on it.
The latest Linux kernel has added support for the R4ās MediaTek CPU (something related to MLO), and the MediaTek team continues releasing updates for the mt76
drivers.
Yes, these are small steps⦠But I hope within the next year, things will run much more stably!
After a long search, I found the phrase ādevelopment boardā:
But I think thatās not enough for most people to truly understand. ā The term āopen sourceā is used much more often than ādevelopment.ā And on the boardās packaging, it only says āopen sourceā ā not ādevelopment board.ā
I would really appreciate a clear explanation of where Banana Piās responsibility begins and ends: ā as a hardware manufacturer ā as a software provider ⦠and where that responsibility stops.
For the BE19, I would have liked an introduction explaining how they addressed the noise issues ā or whether they didnāt care, because the main purpose is software development? That would be totally fine! Uploading a detailed hardware table is a great start: But I miss: power consumption, heat output, current software support status, etc.
What Iām seeing is that we have some people who are disappointed ā justified or not. A simple introduction like that could help us say, āPlease stay away if you expect a polished consumer product.ā
Ironically, someone already did that ā unintentionally ā with their comment
A long time ago, when I was still a rookie, I used the HiSilicon 3531 solution to port the companyās software (using the DVR solution to make an NVR).
I feel that the correct way to use BPI-R4 should be to use the closed-source OpenWRT to modify the system(be WiFi router, if not, frank-wās image better).
Optimized web interface, optimized setting function.
Later, I felt that the problem should be as netizens said, the WiFi NIC hardware design may not be perfect, which may be the reason why BE1900 will be released.
So, regardless of the product introduction, functions, and utilities of BPI-R4, I will wait for BE1900 to see the situation.
If you donāt look at the WiFi function, compared with Raspberry Pi, BPI-R4 is a very good and very distinctive development board product.
Among the development board products currently on the market, there are almost no SFP+ networks, almost no 3 PCI-Es, and almost no two.
The only comparable ones are Intel N100/N150/N200 series products, but the price and scalability are different(and no GPIO ).
Open sourceā and ādeveloper boardā are 2 different things. āOpen sourceā means that the sources are openly available to everyone. This applies to both pre-release versions and finished products. āDeveloper Boardā means that this board is to be seen as a basis for later own products. That said, the R4 and OpenWRT are two completely different products that have absolutely nothing to do with each other. The R4 is compatible with OpenWRT yes, but Banana Pi does not develop OpenWRT. OpenWRT has its own development cycle, independent of Banana Piās products. Thatās why I donāt understand why it is always said that the software for the R4 is immature. When Banana Pi launches a new board on the market, OpenWRT doesnāt really care. Sure, the snapshots try to support the new boards, but that doesnāt affect the current major version. If there is a new major version at some point, the new boards will probably be supported. However, since OpenWRT is open source, it is up to the community to correct existing errors.
whereas āopen sourceā with broadcom/MTK and the other china IP-stealers is more like āwe give some blobs that either work or notā scnr
I guess, it comes down on the definition of ādevelopment boardā - for me it is something like a RaspberryPi/Arduino board: a working board with all major hardware problems solved, available as board with no case and software in a more or less rough state (aka not suitable for end consumer like with nice GUI or so - so some/deep technical knowledge is required).
But, sorry to say, this is more of an internal prototype/beta board which major problems and nobody from SinoVoip does ever report back on any findings or helps finding solutions.
We are all guessing what the problems are for months (e.g. noise problem, some boards limit tx to a few dB), but obviously we are mostly software guys working on OpenWrt and donāt have the hardware equipment (eg. spectrum analyzer to look for rf noise hotspots on the board) of a manufacturer like SinoVoip to find the root cause of the hardware problems and how to mitigate it with some hardware modificationsā¦
So I would like to see SinoVoip to be a bit more active and at least report back if a found issue could be related to hardware or what their opinions are, so we donāt have to freely guess what is wrong on the boardā¦
i could imagine that this is a legal problem when they āfindā something and report it. at least in the EU, when you āfindā a bug that is on hardware side, i am very certain it must be replaced. at least when its within the warranty time. i would love to see the new pro router but i will wait this time too, before i buy it. if it also has those problems (heat, rf noise, m2 wifi compatibility etc.) guess i wont buy :>