SDIO on TOS 6 is not solved. 2,4 GHz and 5 GHz provide 20 MHz only without IEEE 802.11r roaming support (good bye mesh definitively!).
Since TOS 4, 5 GHz band is unstable, only three (not four!) SSID’s and eight connected client is possible. Promised 802.1x has vanished (I know, maybe in TOS 7!).
SDIO card is discontiuned for the long time, Marvell and also NXT will not provide new proprietary firmware compatible with kernel 5.3 and above.
MOX Power Wi-Fi (probably Vintage Wi-Fi) is still in international sold as the secure router and advance solution for networking. But TOS 5 is not secure anymore!
It is no longer a paperweight, but a return to the distant past. Fully functional simple AP cost ~10 €, MOX Power Wi-Fi ~100 €. With MOX B or G module and mPCI card upgrade ~200 €.
The fact, that MOX SDIO isn’t a well engineered Wi-Fi card, has been known since the beginning. Turris team fought and hacked like they could to get it working while recognising the hardware limitations.
Turris / CZ NIC has no arguments at all to get a company like Marvel (/successors) moving. But against all odds they managed to get SDIO working.
I wouldn’t have a use case for this module even if there were no limitations, because I am a power user and upgraded whole house to Wi-Fi 6. MOX pocket Wi-Fi is a Wi-Fi 5 module (for 5 GHz band), 2,4 GHz band features (aka Wi-Fi N / Wi-Fi 4) are from 2009 and where still state of the art when Turris MOX was crowdfunded.
So tell us: what kind of magic do you expect?
From the beginning, Turris team promised to solve the problems with MOX SDIO and continuously repeated and confirmed these promises. In the meantime, MOX with SDIO card was sold in different variants. In addition, a number of issues can still be resolved without vendor assistance.
Long before the release of TOS 6, regardless of whether it used the 5.4, 5.10 or 5.15 kernel, the Turris team knew that SDIO would not work and that they had no way to fix it. The way this fact was communicated is very striking, and the current approach is striking as well.
To this day, there is no information about the non-functioning SDIO in the documentation and worse, MOX with SDIO is still being sold. What kind of magic do I expect? This is perhaps obvious from the preceding lines, because at the same time I am not saying anything that I did not claim several years ago. Now it’s just my words that have come to light.
One more minor note on technology. The Turris MOX with SDIO went on sale at the end of 2019, realistically sometime in 2020 and was presented as a great mesh device e.g. in collaboration with Omnia. So not much time has passed since its launch. 2.4 GHz networks are still commonly used, e.g. because of the signal range.
I totally agree there has to be some announcement about discontinuity of SDIO/MOX pocket Wi-Fi.
This is one general weakness (maybe the biggest after not having enough developers) of the Turris project that there is no good blog/announcement strategy.
But actually I don’t think it is still produced - MOX configurator doesn’t list it anymore. What you can buy atm might be remaining stocks.
Which ones? If it comes to drivers, you cannot do anything without good vendor assistance…
Sry, but all and everything changed. Wi-Fi 6 opened 160 MHz-channels on 2,4 GHz and (much more important) introduced beamforming and MU-MIMO. You can now have range, multiple devices + throughput, which renders 5 GHz useless in rural areas.
Well, marketing. Do you really buy products by what is announced on the outer packaging or do you deepdive into what is really included? I bought the all-famous WRT1900AC because/AFTER users claimed in OpenWrt forum it is working (~ 1 year after it was launched), and not because the Linksys marketing said it does. Mesh is not only wirelessly, but also MOX netboot, which works well…
Its not about the clients but about the AP. As it is downward compatible, it will serve all older and newer clients - and please don’t tell you need throughput and low latency for your smart bulbs (this helps only botnets as soon as the bulb has been hacked)
Ok, I got your point now. I haven’t studied Wifi 6 yet too much, so it’s new to me that Wifi 6 should be backwards compatible with Wifi 4/5 clients. But, as always, you can just hope that the crappiest of crap wifi chips in the lightbulbs will be actually compatible.
It IS backwarts compatible - I use it with crappy LifX 1st gen. And get on the same card in 2,4 GHz network in parallel real wireless throughput of 400 Mbit/s plus with a 2017 XPS laptop (Intel 2×2 ↔ AW7915-NP1 4×4, theoretical maximum 576 MBit/s).
But back to topic - such was never possible or meant to be possible for MOX SDIO.
TL; DR: SDIO has undeniable limitations to functionality and connected clients but DOES now work with TOSv6 and is definitely enough for basic use cases (and no, it was never and couldn’t have ever been cheap as it is sold in small batch sizes by a small open hardware/open source vendor)! So Turris team kept their promises to the extend they were able to.
