Banana Pi has released the BPI-RT2, a bare router board for home networks, wireless access points and small office routers. CNX Software reported it on 30 October 2026. It sells for $26 in the official Banana Pi store and $25.20 plus shipping on AliExpress. That puts it among the cheapest ways to get a Wi-Fi 6 board with Gigabit Ethernet for a homemade router or a dedicated access point for IoT devices.

Hardware

  • SoC: Realtek RTL8198D, a dual-core MIPS interAptiv processor with built-in Gigabit Ethernet switching.
  • Memory and storage: 256 MB DDR3 RAM and 128 MB SPI-NAND flash.
  • Ethernet: one Gigabit WAN port and three Gigabit LAN ports.
  • Wi-Fi 6 (AX3000): dual-band with 2x2 MIMO on each band, a Realtek RTL8892XBR for 2.4 GHz and a Realtek RTL8832D for 5 GHz, MU-MIMO and four antenna connectors.
  • USB: one USB 3.0 Type-A port.
  • Expansion: 5-pin and 9-pin headers with GPIO and I2C, plus a UART debug interface.
  • Other: reset, boot and WPS buttons, power, WAN and LAN LEDs.
  • Power: 12 V DC through a barrel jack.
  • Size: 97 x 65 mm, the same as the earlier BPI-WiFi5 board.

The GPIO and I2C headers make it possible to hang a sensor or a status display directly on the router. Banana Pi's getting started guide covers how to assign the GPIO pins.

Software is the weak point

Banana Pi ships a firmware image based on OpenWrt 22.03, with the source code on GitHub. It is built on Banana Pi's own Realtek board support package, not on an official OpenWrt release. CNX Software points out that the OpenWrt 22.03 branch reached end of life in July 2024, so the image no longer receives upstream security fixes. For a device that sits between the home network and the internet, that is a real drawback. Anyone thinking of using the board as a main router should check first whether the RTL8198D gets support in mainline OpenWrt.

Firmware can be updated through the web interface or over TFTP. Banana Pi also publishes schematics and DXF design files, which helps anyone designing their own enclosure.

Background

Realtek listed the RTL8198D in its Wi-Fi 6 and Wi-Fi 7 router roadmap in 2023, in dual-core and triple-core versions. The BPI-RT2 joins Banana Pi's other low-cost router boards, the BPI-WiFi5 with a Siflower SF19A28 MIPS chip and the BPI-WiFi6 with a Triductor Arm Cortex-A9 processor. Compared with the BPI-WiFi5, it adds Wi-Fi 6 and USB 3.0.