Which NIC to buy for WiFi (Intel, Atheros or ...)

M

Martin Paredes

I have a laptop DELL XPS 13 (9343) with a NIC Dell Wireless 1560 (Broadcom BCM4352) and I think that this NIC will not have a driver for at least the next few years, so I decided to buy one to replace it.

Trying to buy something for the future, the NIC must have 802.11ac, in addition to Intel and Atheros, what other options are in FreeBSD?

With the Intel driver iwm(4) I know what NIC should I buy (searching the Internet I found that the Intel Dual Band Wireless AC 8265 is also supported)

For the Atheros, I did not find a driver, but Adrian Chadd is working in a port called ath10k, the most recent information (which I could find) indicates that it is a work in progress, also I could not find information about: what models are going to be supported? and where to buy it?

In his blog Adrian Chadd's Ramblings - Bringing up 802.11ac on FreeBSD, talks about a QCA chip/firmware
 
Adrian has a QCA988X and its driver works on it, apparently. I have a QCA6174 and it didn't work for me. The problem is that he doesn't own a QCA6174, so it's complicated for him to debug the thing.

If your Broadcom BCM4352 has a functioning driver under linux, you can install a bhyve VM with Debian and bridge it with FreeBSD. No cost except time.
 
You're lucky, apparently your NIC it's being tested, I found your firmware in the repository

If I search QCA9880 in Amazon, all the result are NIC of full size Mini PCIe, and my NIC Dell Wireless 1560 (Broadcom BCM4352) is a M.2

At the moment my best option is the Intel Dual Band Wireless AC 8265
 
For my QCA6174, I did what I advised you. And it works since a month. For the moment, I will stay on this.

Furthermore, I had to make this NIC run not really on FreeBSD but on pfSense (currently based on FreeBSD 11.2, 12.0 upcoming). So, maybe in the near future, pfSense will recognize this NIC. Then, I will redesign my box.
 
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