Banana Pi BPI-Wifi 6 is an ultra-low-cost WiFi 6 router board with five Gigabit Ethernet ports based on Triductor Technology TR6560 dual-core Cortex-A9 router SoC and TR5220 WiFi 6 chipset and that sells for just $26.32 plus shipping on Aliexpress, or $39.99 as part of a kit with the board, four antennas, and a 12V power supply.
The board is equipped with 512MB RAM and a 128MB SPI flash for OpenWrt, comes with four antenna connectors for WiFi, and can also take an optional 12V PoE module for power instead of relying on a 12V power adapter via a DC jack.
Banana Pi BPI-WiFi 6 board specifications:
- SoC – Triductor TR6560 dual-core Arm Cortex-A9 processor @ 1.2 GHz with LSW (Line-Card Switching) and hardware NAT up to 5 Gbps
- WiFi chipset – Triductor TR5220 WiFi 6 chipset
- System Memory – 512 MB DDR3
- Storage – 128MB SPI NAND flash
- Networking
- 1x Gigabit Ethernet WAN port with optional PoE support
- 4x Gigabit Ethernet LAN ports
- 2.4 GHz WiFi 6 (802.11ax) 2×2 MIMO up to 573.5 Mbps
- 5 GHz WiFi 6 (802.11ax) 2×2 MIMO up to 2401.9 Mbps
- 4x U.FL antenna connector
- WiFi supports AP and STA modules, WPA, WPA2, WPA3 security
- Debugging – 6-pin debug UART header
- Misc – Power switch, Reset button, WPS button, 9x LEDs
- Power Supply
- 12V DC via power barrel jack
- Optional RT5400 PoE module
- Dimensions – 137 x 107 mm
The board runs OpenWrt, but no source code is provided at this time, and we only have a binary image (tgp3.1.0-rc4-THG6500-TAX2-squashfs-sysupgrade.bin) available for download through the Wiki for the board. The video below shows the board powered by PoE and booting to OpenWrt with Linux 5.10.138 and running the LuCi web interface.
Triductor Technology is a chip design company headquartered in Suzhou, China, and they appear to specialize in router and PLC chips. The SoC page has one dual-core Cortex-A9 router SoC for xDSL gateways, but nothing about the TR6560 processor, and the WiFi page features a couple of wireless chips but the TR5220 found in the Banana Pi BPI-WiFi 6 board is nowhere to be found. Searching the web for TR6560 on Google and Baidu always brings up the Banana Pi board, so it does not look like other companies are using the chips yet.
Banana Pi should probably design an enclosure for this type of board and sells it as a complete WiFi 6 router for under $50, although the lack of source code is worrying for a router. I’ve had a look at WiFi 6 routers on Amazon, and the cheapest I could find is the TP-Link Archer AX10 going for $59.99 but with the combined speed limited to 1,500 Mbps (AX1500 router).
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
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openwrt community says there will never be official support for this board https://forum.openwrt.org/t/a-new-cheap-26-bpi-ax3000-router/164455/4
Would be good if the openwrt crew could actually stop sinovoip making use of the (misleading) openwrt (advertisement) for their products
Yes it’s particularly misleading, it’s just the binary resulting from a fork of openwrt. We’re way past the “fair use” or “oops sorry I thought it was OK to call it like this”, this looks deliberately misleading. If it were an accident, at least the sources would be provided with it. And if buildable sources are not provided, it’s a blatant violation of various licenses involved in the project, GPL first.
It’s really annoying to see vendors proceed like this. In the past I’ve spent a lot of time distributing free hardware (glinet repurposed in a load balancer) for students and took great care of documenting the whole build system and packaging the sources in a way that allowed the end user to modify and rebuild everything from scratch. And I had the doc tested by two different users on two different distros and it worked. There was a bug in a script and I published a quick fix. One user complained that I didn’t provide the updated source tarball for that exact fix (they were right). I explained what line had to be changed and that it took me amazingly long a time to rebuild all source packages by then. But I agreed with them, they were right, I was just running too short of time and was doing my best.
Thus, seeing companies not making the slightest effort and purposely misleading their uesrs really irritates me, because the effort they don’t put there makes them more competitive than those doing their best to comply with the rules, and that’s definitely not fair at all and it hurts opensource a lot.
Stopped reading at
> The board runs OpenWrt, but no source code is provided
Original banaware – nothing to buy
we have discussed with Triductor, and will update source code
Ideally, Triductor should work on getting their chip to mainline and then the platform would likely become very popular because of the value proposition and the platform getting the latest version of the code with security updates.
Yes, we are trying to work in this direction, and then let all chip manufacturers to do in this direction, this is the meaning of we do this thing
Very good post and interesting board. However I see that the basic board cost 50€ shipped to Greece. You can find on AliExpress the Redmi AX3000 at the same cost including case, antennae and there’s some work porting openwrt for this and similar Redmi routers but with 256mb ram.
https://s.click.aliexpress.com/e/_DnFrT4N
Truductor seem to be another anti-sanction name for Hisilicon/Huawei chips, which in turn are Broadcom licensee (as far as I remember).
The file /lib/modules/5.10.138/wifi_debug.ko inside firmware’s squashfs contains the following string:
[HCC_TEST][WIFI]########Hi110x SDIO Test## Used %llu seconds##########
https://github.com/XePeleato/Hi1101_HisiWifi
OpenWrt source code for the THG6500 platform used in the BPI-Wifi 6 router board: https://github.com/BPI-SINOVOIP/THG6500-TAX2-OPENWRT-BSP