Does anyone actually have their R4 with the BE1400 running properly as their main router?

Banana Pi Router design BPI-R4(MT7988)
1

I’ve had my BPI-R4 with the BE1400 WiFi 7 board for over a month now and it still hasn’t left my desk because I’ve yet to get useable performance out of it.

This got me wondering:

  1. Has anyone managed useable performance and range from the BE1400?
  2. If so what did you do to get there?
  3. Does anyone use theirs as their main router?

I purchased mine thinking it would be a kind of like a Raspberry Pi, but targeted more toward being an open source WiFi router. Which it essentially is. But I didn’t fully realize the state of the WiFi when I decided to buy it. I saw a reasonable price, great reviews and decided to give it a shot, especially since I’m not finding “off the shelf” hardware with those specs for anywhere near that price any time soon.

I understood that I wasn’t buying “a wifi router”, I knew full well I wasn’t going to put it together and like magic it would work… But I wasn’t expecting it to be this broken either. The Amazon listing for the R4 has fantastic reviews, and I’ve seen other Banana Pi products featured positively in several Youtube videos.

So I’m not sure if my expectations were too high or just too soon. I’ve been all over these forums, OpenWRT forums, GitHub, Discord and Reddit for over a month now and I still don’t have a full grasp on what the status of this unit is and if it’ll ever actually be a usable WiFi router.

  1. Will it ever perform properly with driver updates or is it a hardware problem?
  2. Is there any idea if Mediatek plans on updating or open sourcing their driver?
  3. What’s the deal with the “new” module? I’ve seen a few places mention the possibility of a new 14 antenna module. But I know there was also an older 14 antenna module.

Overall the current state of things is really confusing, and it’s difficult to know what the next steps to take are.

This isn’t a rage post, I’m not mad and I knew I was taking a gamble when I bought it. It’s more of, I’ve tried for over a month to get my head wrapped around this and I’m still not sure what direction I should be focused in.

2

Good question. Im also not mad but have almost the same exact story as you. bought the 8gb ram version and I’ve been tinkering with it about a month. Then my wrt3200acm died so the r4 had to step it up.

I am using bpi-r4 as my main router I just have the be14000 turned off because I have a few access points around my house that work fine because the wrt3200acm never had the strongest wifi anyway.

I’ve started building openwrt with the stuff I like and the r4 works great as my main router.

3

The OpenSource OpenWRT office have already support BPI-R4 + BE14.

https://firmware-selector.openwrt.org/?version=24.10.1&target=mediatek%2Ffilogic&id=bananapi_bpi-r4

you can download the latest images , then upgrade the BPI-R4.

Finally you only configrate these interface on 192.168.1.1 web UI.

4

Just tested my wifi and when I am in the same room (10 feet from router) as the 24.10.1 build. I get 710Mbps down / 31Mbps up.

I have 1Gbps /35Mbps internet. So that works great.

If I put one wall between me and the router (20ft) it drops to 120Mbps down/ 31Mbps up…2 walls (about 40ft) 0 down / 0 up.

wifi7 settings BE/6GHz/auto/80MHz/ transmit power (driver default) 7 dBm.

I also like OP can’t find out the answers to his 3 questions. will BE19000 fix issues and/or is BE14000 a lost cause?

Again not making a complaint I am having fun with the system. I just have a hard time putting together all the different information that is all spread out.

And it really doesn’t help that mediatek firmware is also called openwrt-mtk. (in my opinion)