OpenWrt One - celebrating 20 years of OpenWrt

[Daniel Golle]

On Tue, Jan 09, 2024 at 05:52:57PM +0100, Rafał Miłecki wrote:
> On 9.01.2024 13:29, John Crispin wrote:
> > On 09.01.24 12:56, Robert Marko wrote:
> > > ---SNIP---
> > > 
> > > > Why not 6GHz?
> > > 6GHz requires an external card, and I doubt you can fit that in the
> > > target price.
> > > 
> > > Regards,
> > > Robert
> > 
> > correct. as mentioned in the email, we wanted to start out small. also upstream mac80211 is still missing a bunch of 11be related features.
> 
> 6 GHz doesn't imply 802.11be, does it? I'm really not sure.

You are right, 6 GHz does *not* imply 802.11be. 802.11ax with HE rates
is sufficient.

However, as one is not supposed to send beacons or do actice scanning
on the 6 GHz band (simply because there are too many channels...) you
would need MBO features to inform clients about 6 GHz AP being
available, and that doesn't yet work very well (due to missing mac80211,
cfg80211 and hostapd features afaik).

> 
> Does MediaTek have any 802.11ax solutions that cover both: 5 GHz and
> 6 GHz? Maybe it'd be worth checking if that's an option and then use
> voting to see if people care?

Afaik the only reasonable way to implement tri-band 2.4G + 5G + 6G using
MTK SoCs is to use the in-SoC WiFi MAC to connect an MT7976A frontend and
use that for 2.4 GHz and 6 GHz, and then put an additional MT7915E
connected via PCIe for the 5 GHz band.
The only tri-band device I know is Adtran's SmartRG SDG-8632.