Banana Pi BPI-R4 showcased as new router board with WiFi 7 connectivity and 5G support

Banana Pi has introduced the BPI-R4, a single-board computer (SBC) that the company has designed as a router board. Arguably, the BPI-R4's standout feature is its WiFi 7 support, which Banana Pi has not enabled by default. Instead, the SBC requires a WiFi 7 network interface card (NIC) that can be connected via the board's two mini PCIe sockets. For reference, the latter operates on the PCIe 3.0 x2 standard.

Additionally, the BPI-R4 has a MediaTek MT7988A SoC, which MediaTek also refers to as the Filogic 880. The MediaTek MT7988A contains four ARM Cortex-A73 CPU cores clocked at 1.8 GHz and a packet accelerator, with 4 GB of DDR4 RAM on hand as well as 8 GB of eMMC flash storage and 128 MB SPI-NAND flash. Moreover, the SBC has an M.2 Key M slot for NVMe SSDs (PCI 3.0 x1), a MicroSD card reader, two 10 Gigabit cages, four RJ45 ports, an M.2 Key-B slot for adding a 4G/5G modem and three Nano SIM card slots.

Banana Pi hopes to start offering the BPI-R4 in Q1 2024. The company expects the SBC to support Debian and OpenWrt, although it has revealed full software details yet. Banana PI has not disclosed pricing yet either, but more details about the BPI-R4 can be found on the company's wiki page.

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