AsiaRF Wi-Fi 7 Tri-Band Module Coming Soon!

Hello,

I just got a word there will be a new Tri-Band Wi-Fi 7 module introduced on CES in Vegas in January 9-12 by AsiaRF! Reason why they have not gone to produce a AW7916-NP1 - only the NPD…

I hope Turris Omnia will support it soon!

I’ll update this with info once released - unless someone beats me to it!

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I think I have something to share, which popped out on the social media:

Will you use somehow the Wi-Fi 7 soonish?

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I have one device where I didn’t upgrade the oldish WiFi 5-card by now :scream:

I think using Turris Omnia is still cutting edge (there is no other upgradeable board that has nearly native OpenWrt and is actively supported) and therefore looking for the best upgrades is a natural thing to do. Even though the most recent upgrades have been deployed only one year ago…

But back to topic: looking at the data rates that WiFi 7 offers I fear our beloved Turris Omnia will not serve the next gen WIFI speeds anymore. Built-in mPCIe can deliver 2,5Gbit/s which is exactly the speed the SFP supports. So serving WiFi 6 5GHz 4×4x4 is fine. But anything beyond cannot deliver higher speeds.
You might in special areas get a better coverage using WiFi 7, but that could also be done via good external antennas and WiFi 5/6.
So - sorry, but upgrading TO (and even less MOX) to WiFi 7 doesn’t not make much sense to me.

Don’t forget that not all traffic has to go through the upstream port. Many people have local NAS drives or other sources of large data where good LAN throughput is still a good thing. Although I’m more of a cable guy, so I’m not going over Gbit on my LAN, but at least it is a stable and predictable Gbit =)

There’s also the fact that you never really get the full advertised speeds of Wi-Fi. A card with a theoretical 5gb/s max might still be fine on a 2.5gb/s uplink in practice.

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Cannot be used with TO or MOX. Will TO Enterprise have the needed physical space for it on its board?

That’s an abomination :smiley: Theoretically, there are mPCIe space savers that could help with this, but I haven’t seen any that would shift the port to the side. On the other hand, it shouldn’t be difficult to design a PCB adapter board.

Well… One could use two miniPCIe Riser Cards and attach this monster to the TOs upper enclosure, but I was never really lucky using them.

Technically speaking the respective driver would address both ports simultaneously, right?
And 13 antennas is simply… Wow. Dunno if one could combine the 2 and 5GHz ones, so it is “only” 9 (but that would decrease the possibilities for WiFi 7 channel combinations, right?). Which still would create problems in terms of interferences.

This would be therefore be a real challenge for modders :wink:

You could get longer coax pigtails and mount some of these antennas externally. They offer quite long ones.

Or use external antenna-cables and external antennas (normally offering N-jacks) e.g.
Sure, but that is not what most people would want. They want to have a non-visible technical installation because those boxes are simply ugly :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

And one problem persists: 6GHz has a very low range - you need antennas directly at the place where you want to use that throughput. So one repeater/antenna-installation per room. Now go and try to hide a 13 antennas monster in each relevant room of your house :flushed:

I will stick with my thesis - WiFi 7 does not bring any benefit for private areas. Even if you change the platform and get something decent like a BPi R4 with native mPCie 3.0x2 ports internally and dual 10GBit SFP+ -ports (after development is done in 3-6 months) that is designed for such a WiFi 7-card. Because (besides the aesthetic arguments mentioned above) our dear mobile devices still only have two antennas each. And there is no real world use case for high throughput beyond two devices simultaneously doing a backup to a local 10GBit enabled server (maximum real world speed ~1,5GiB (WiFi 6E) x2=3GiB on the access points’ side). Any traffic besides that would be either cable bound (I am a SFP+ -guy) or not relevant like <100Mbit/s streaming or alike.

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Nit: I count 9+5=14 on the pictures, but that doesn’t really change anything in this discussion :slight_smile:

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Even BananaPi announced a similar card, probably very close to a reference design from MediaTek.

That card is specific for their bpi-r4 router.
Not sure if Asiarf has a router for their card.

Reminds me this picture (stolen from Reddit):

And if you ask what is on the latest picture of the router I have to say: “YES, this will be Omnia NG” :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

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… and it is mounted with a rope from the ceiling (no other options possible).
And as it has to solve the 15 cm-distance between antennae, it will be a real big death star :joy:

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