Ideally the 14 antenna version would be redesigned to use diplexers in the same way the 6 antenna version has, reducing the antennas to 10 and retaining full fat wifi.
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Hello,
there is a picture of the WiFi 7 modul with 6 antennas in the wiki:
https://wiki.banana-pi.org/Getting_Started_with_BPI-R4#4.1.29BPI-R4-NIC-BE14
This “explains” the case design of eight antennas → 6 antennas for Wifi 7 and 2 antennas for 4/5G cellular modem?
I also read the discussions about 6 or 14 antenna boards. For my little room the 6 antenna board is good. But what I ask myself in general (also for BPI-R3), is it possible to turn off one wifi chip to spare the power? → For exampe MT7977IAN (6Ghz) on R4?
Is there any news about the 14 antenna version?
Tbh, I’m not interested in the 6 antenna version. I was looking forward to purchasing a BPI-R4 so long as a 14 or 10-antenna version of the Wifi 7 module was available, since that would make the BPI-R4 basically one of the best APs hardware-wise on the market for insane value. That is not the case for the 6 antenna version which gimps out on the crucial 5 GHz and 6 GHz bands, and does not allow us to test Mediateks claims about 4T5R on the 6 GHz band.
I will continue to hold off getting a BPI-R4 until the 14 or 10 antenna version of this module is released with the full-fat support for 5 GHz and 6 GHz spacial streams.
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I’d love the 14 antenna version, I’ve brought an BPi-R4 and really want to add wifi 7 to it. Please do a run of these, I’ll even buy 2
Really looking forward to the 14 antenna version. Any updates? I could use several of these.
Is there a date when the wifi module will be available? I can’t find a source :frown:
i asked one from banana pi, she told me in 2 months and i asked her in early jan. - so i would expect the module in about a month, ±
Imho we need to do first tests before it will be made public. Currently i have the problem that only 2.4g and 6g device is created…5g is missing…i guess this is a firmware issue.
ok so that means, the answer from banana pi is outdated and there is no timeline anymore? firmware issue sounds like “might take a lot of time” 
I don’t know timeline so far…maybe firmware issue is fixed soon,but last week was chinese new year and there was no further information on this. I don’t think this is hardware issue so it can be fixed in software which mostly needs less time as driver is already upstream
I don’t think, this is how it works here! “You” have to take off the end customer view! To have the hardware is just half of the journey. This means not very much!
Now is the time for dangowrt, frank-w and all the others who work on the software … And it looks like mediatek and bananapi still also has software work to do!
If you compare time which was needed for a stable R3 you can estimate the time for R4:
But until an “rc” there will be a time with snapshots? Patience will be needed!
In the open wrt firmware selector there is even no snapshot for R4 yet. https://firmware-selector.openwrt.org/
There was a comment of a guy which is still in my mind. He said about the relese date of the Wifi Nic boards something like “this is to late”.
It looks for me that some people are not here because of openwrt. They are here because of wanting a high end router board (which is not wrong reason!). But the expectation to get this even faster than the common routers producers are able to, is unrealistic … but I understand the excitement 
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No, there is: OpenWrt Firmware Selector
However, it’s a snapshot of OpenWrt main, not a stable release, release candidate, or even a release branch snapshot. Those won’t happen until the next major OpenWrt series branches off from main, which might not happen until 2025, due OpenWrt developers on the mailing list choosing to go with a 6.6 kernel for the next release instead of a 6.1 kernel. The last time they did kind of thing (scrapping their previous work and master and skipping an LTS kernel version) that was in 2020 and it ended up delaying the release about a year. Notice how the version number went from 19.07 to 21.02, with no 20.xx release.
zuowei has solved this problem, you can contact him about this
Thanks !!!
I could swear I’ve looked three times for the snapshot of R4.
shame on me …
You are both right. The snapshot was added and built between both your posts 
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It has been a while since the last update. Is there any news on the availability of the Wifi NIC?
We have not got it working yet in mainline linux,not sure it is driver or firmware issue
@zuowei8 can you help porting wifi-support to mainline-kernel?
i know you work on this
but it seems that i missed a change in my upstream tree
maybe you can point me on missing change…
Any update regarding the date when this module can be purchased? Or is there an alternative wifi module for the bpi r4?