So, the misery and disappointment of this company’s utterly, catastrophically, nuclear holocaust grade bad communication continues…
I received my WiFi7 NIC about a month or so ago, but didnt have time to play with it. That’s OK. I finally got a chance, so I dutifully assembled it into it’s case, which went well (if a bit fiddly, which I can live with).
Having done that, I hopped onto the wiki to find the firmware (I want to run OpenWRT), and I found this page:
Which lists two “Release images”.
Ok, Lets read…
Version 4.0: Kernel version: 5.4.271 MTK vendor’s MP4.0 wifi image package name: BPI-R4-BE1350-WIFI_MP4_0-SDK-20240620, fixed MP3.1 wifi SDK wifi route performance issue.
Yay! a fixed thing, this is good! My hope started to return…
MTK vendor’s MP4.0 wifi driver sourcecode can’t be open source. only release Image.
(support Quectel RM500U-CN & RM520N-GL 5G Modules, EC25 EM05 4G Modules)
Wait. WHAT?!
I BOUGHT THIS PIECE OF CRAP BECAUSE ITS SUPPOSED TO BE 100% OPEN SOURCE. WTAF?
I dont recall seeing this dire warning last time i looked at the wiki.
What the hell guys?
Anyway, it gets worse…
So I download the image (what choice do I have? the 3.1 image clearly has a performance bug according to the same page).
Pop it on an SD card, and, to its credit, it booted!
I logged in, my hope once again starting to soar…
I clicked on the wireless menu…
Wait - why can I not choose any options for encryption? whats going on?
Hmmm… What’s this “MTK” menu then?
Ohhh, I see - not only do I have a proprietary driver, I also have a proprietary user interface for configuring the wifi. How fucking wonderful.
Ah well. I’ve already spent hundreds of pounds on this piece of crap. I might as well try it out, right?
The “MTK” web interface is absolute shit. Everything you do makes it pop up some kind of “Please wait” dialogue that doesn’t ever actually finish spinning round and round. Refreshing the page “fixes” that, but gives no indication of wether “whatever it is doing” has worked or not.
After quite a lot of slow, frustrating, ANNOYING, trial and error, I finally get the thing to work.
Apparently, my perfectly fine WiFi6 phone can’t see the thing, nor can my kids.
In fact, the ONLY device I have that can see this piece of shit is my AX200 equipped debian PC.
Ok, lets do a side by side basic test by pinging it… BT Homehub5a (WiFi5) located in the attic, two floor up directly overhead (ie. worst case antenna location) - 1.47ms ping, rock solid reliable. (total cost, £5 from ebay with shipping and power supply included) BPI-r4 (WiFi6) located 4m away across the room - 2.4ms (total cost, well over £200 by this point, and didnt even come with a power supply).
Really impressive work guys – You’ve taken faster hardware, and a nice open source OS, and then ruined everything with:
- a proprietary driver.
- a proprietary nonstandard, and shit configuration gui.
- worse performance (latency-wise) than my 10 year old garbage router.
But why should I care? It oly cost 40 times as much.
I hope someone can tell me that all the above is some kind of huge mistake on my part, and I’m somehow missing the wonderful, up to date, properly implemented, and OPEN version of it on the website somewhere.
Anyone? Is it me? Have I just got it all wrong?
Or have I just fallen for a bunch of Chinese promises, lies, half truths, and crappy marketing AGAIN?
God I feel like a fool for ever believing the promises made of the BPI-r4.