New wifi cable routing has made a drastic difference in performance with the BE14

Banana Pi Router design BPI-R4/BPI-R4 Pro(MT7988)
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Ran a few tests last week that involved me running the R4 outside of its case. For one of tests I didn’t even bother connecting the antennas, just the cables and it was the most stable speeds i had seen yet out of this thing. But I put it back together and it was complete crap again…

This was really eating at me so I spent way too much time this past weekend experimenting with different cable routing when I finally hit a configuration that just blew me away.

I have tested numerous community images as well as the official Sinovoip image and they all run great (relatively speaking) with this config.

With line of sight im getting over 1Gbps, even upto 10ft away Im still between 800-900Mbps. Moving a room away im still around 300-500Mbps. Even on the complete opposite end of the house i’m able to connect and usually get around 30Mbps, though at this distance it’s not stable. I can stand in the same spot and simply turn around and drop to 0Mbps.

It’s worth noting that the placement of the R4 is terrible for these tests as-well. Not only is it just sitting on my desk, at the complete opposite end of the house. There is a decent amount of metal objects between me and the R4 along with my current router being dead center of the house making all kinds of competing noise.

I thought it was just a fluke, but it’s going on three days now so I figured it might be worth sharing. Sorry for the crude drawing, I didn’t photograph it because I honestly didn’t think it was going to work.

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What cables are you using? Your findings would point to bad shielding in the cable.

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These are the “Short” version: https://a.co/inqTInz

And the “Long” version: https://a.co/d/hliSV5t

To clarify, I’m not saying anything is wrong. It’s the exact opposite.

This is the best performance I have ever gotten out of the BE14 by a VERY large margin. This routing is literally the very first time since I’ve owned the R4 that the BE14 has legitably provided usable performance.

The speed and range have nearly tripled since I rerouted in this specific config.

If you didn’t see my older posts my performance was essentially; ~1Gb/s within 1ft, it would drop to about 300Mb/s within about 5ft, 30Mb/s just walking out of the door, 10-15ft around 10-20Mb/s, and I could forget going any further or id loose the SSID completely. eg. it was previously completely unusable.

Those results were with the original thin black cables, and these new ones I have.

But ever since I re-routed the cables to this exact layout my performance is actually completely usable, I may legitimately be able to use this as my main WiFi router.

The speeds are currently significantly faster and more stable then with my current ASUS BE58U

I wanted to share my results because it goes against the two biggest routing suggestions I have seen on here which is “Stay away from the mPCIe slots”, and "Stay away from the GPIO.

Im wondering if having the thicker shielding of the cables between the BE14 and the motherboard is helping to block noise coming from the motherboard since the 6GHz cables are now actually routed under the BE14.

One other thing I did before setting it up like this was a very very carefully made all of these cable have very gentle curves, there are not sharp angles anywhere. The 6GHz cable are all as short as possible, and kept very close to each-other, and the 2GHz are longer and spread apart from each-other.

I also very meticulously took a pair of needle nose pliers and ben’t the connectors to snap on the BE14 with the nice solid “snap” when they’re connected.

Obviously, just like everyone else I still plan on getting the BE19 the moment I can get my hands on one, but for now the performance Im seeing from this layout is amazing. Especially considering my BE14 is one of the ones with the bad eprom data.

For a more tangible example, my noise has gone from around -70dBm to around -84dBm and up.

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I see the cables are running across the wifi chips on the BE14 board. How did you cool the chips, since it’s no longer possible to use the thermal pads and use the bottom of the case for cooling.

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No,

grafik

He should have written ‘between the BE14 and the R4 mainboard’… :see_no_evil:

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The cables go under the BE14. I tired to show that by going over them with a darker blue color.

The other cables go under the NVME drive.

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Yeah I probably should have been more specific. I regret not taking a picture of it when I did it. But like I said, I honestly wasn’t expecting it to work :sweat_smile:

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I wonder if just adding some grounded wires in the same area would work.

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Does it come in an enclosure or is it bare? Hopefully, someone will recreate it.

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I made the wiring changes listed above and have noticed significant stability improvements over the last 2 days. I just used the cables that came with my antennas, and the long ones are a bit longer than 8" so they loop up and back down before attaching to the case.

I’m plagued with the known issue of Tx-Power being limited to 6dBm/7dBm for no reason, but even with that, I now can use the wireless upstairs (albeit at 4.7Mbps download speeds, sad that that’s a great improvement :smile: ) . I’m running openwrt 24.10.2 .

3 Likes
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Do you think it makes a difference for using 4 and 6 inch instead of 6 and 8 inch cables? :thinking:

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Which WIFI setup are you using? BE (for all 3 frequencies) oder AX?

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Banana Pi Opensource Wifi7 Router base on BPI-R4, new case and Heat sink sheet inside. will comming soon, are you want one??

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Looks nice, but i would be more happy about aome finishing and less announcing :wink: (be19, r4 pro, wifi extension cable, pro case)

It looks more and more that the r4 is some kind of a global wifi7 test case :yum: (finished products are announced and coming soon :grin:)

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