Put simply: Having the best networking features at the lowest price seems too good to be true. But Banana Pi’s $30 BPI-WiFi 6 router seems to promise blazing wireless speeds and open-source flexibility rarely seen in consumer devices.
This unassuming little router is packed with powerful features under the hood. It utilizes the Triductor TR6560 SoC with dual Cortex-A9 CPU cores running at 1.2 GHz and Triductor’s TR5220 Wi-Fi 6 chipset. On the wireless side, it uses the latest Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax) standard to support 2×2 MIMO with speeds up to 573 Mbps on the 2.4 GHz band and 2.4 Gbps on 5 GHz.
Wired Gigabit Ethernet hasn’t been forgotten either, and one WAN port and three LAN ports are included. If you need to power your router via Ethernet, an optional PoE module is also available, but this must be soldered. According to Banana Pi, the 2.4GHz signal has a range of up to 40 meters, and the 5GHz band has a range of up to 160 meters. WPA3 password protection is also supported.
The real gimmick of this router is the open source firmware – OpenWrt – that comes preloaded out of the box. Rather than a proprietary, locked-down OS, it runs a highly customizable OpenWrt Linux distribution designed specifically for embedded devices like routers and access points. This gives advanced users unprecedented control over configuring every aspect of the system.
The OpenWrt project is still in development, but we are working on a reference firmware specification with additional features for retail routers that cost around $100. But Banana Pi is getting ahead of the curve by taking his existing OpenWrt-compatible hardware and packaging it as a ready-to-use product.
That said, it’s important to note that BPI-WiFi is running a fork of OpenWrt maintained by Banana Pi, rather than the mainline upstream version. Therefore, your device may not receive the latest features and security patches the earliest compared to the official release. According to the GitHub log, the code was written 7 months ago.
Still, for buyers looking for extreme value and open source flexibility, Banana Pi’s new Wi-Fi 6 products could be the perfect offering, offering cutting-edge wireless performance and Gigabit Ethernet at the highest price point. There is a gender. At the moment, this router is only available from sites like his AliExpress, but perhaps this could become more widely available if demand proves the ultra-low-cost concept.
