On Thu 29 Jan 2026, Stefan Sperling wrote: > > Overall, I think you will have a much better time with an external AP.
Seconded, but the dream of not having to handle a downstream access point and its own unique software stack lives on. > There are athn(4) USB devices (AR9287) which work in client and hostap mode. > They are slow with our driver because the driver still lacks support for > 11n Tx aggregation. Adding support for this is a non-trivial task. What's > cool about USB athn though is that the firmware we use is open source. > In theory, anyone could fix anything in the firmware and driver. > Unfortunately we have never, ever, received outside contributions to the > driver or firmware. The only thing which changed is that people have stopped > randomly complaining about the use of closed-source firmware. It seems these > people are not actually making use of their freedom to fix things. I have found that I can source AR9280+AR7010 (USB 2.0) devices rather easily and cheaply through Mercari in Japan (they are far more of a pain to find and more expensive on say eBay). From what I can tell, all these devices were designed for TV sets from various brands back around 2010. Handed out three of these at EuroBSDCon 2026 last weekend in the hope that we can get some movement in terms of development, as they support 2.4/5GHz *and* hostap *and* are one of few devices (if not the only) with these features and open source firmware. These are WLI-UV-AG300 (sometimes called WLI-UV-AG300P, as that is what is written on the box rather than the device) devices which are cheaper, but from what I can tell identical in hardware to similar devices labeled for example Sony. As of August, they will attach on -current as my patch got accepted around that time. In the interest of driving further development, I am willing to source more of these devices and pay for shipping for anyone that wants one and is willing to take a stab at development (it is *far* beyond my own abilities). If you are "only" a user, you can also reach out, but I can only source about one of these per month at prices I consider to be tolerable for ~15 year old WiFi hardware, so my priority is to encourage development and I am not to looking to set up a USB device distribution centre and have thus not made my mind up as to how I will treat user requests.
