In brief: Getting premium networking features at rock-bottom prices seems too good to be true. But Banana Pi's $30 BPI-WiFi 6 router appears to deliver, promising blistering wireless speeds and open-source flexibility rarely found in consumer devices.

This unassuming little router packs a serious punch under the hood. It utilizes a Triductor TR6560 SoC with dual Cortex-A9 CPU cores running at 1.2GHz, along with Triductor's TR5220 Wi-Fi 6 chipset. On the wireless side, it supports 2x2 MIMO with maximum speeds of 573Mbps on the 2.4GHz band and 2.4Gbps over 5GHz using the latest Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax) standard.

Wired Gigabit Ethernet isn't forgotten either, with one WAN port and three LAN ports included. There's also an optional PoE module available if you need to power the router over Ethernet, but it needs to be soldered. Banana Pi says the 2.4GHz signal can reach up to 40 meters, while the 5GHz band has a range of up to 160 meters. WPA3 password protection is supported too.

The real trick up this router's sleeve is its open-source firmware - OpenWrt - which it comes preloaded with right out of the box. Rather than a locked-down proprietary OS, it runs the highly customizable OpenWrt Linux distribution designed specifically for embedded devices like routers and access points. This gives advanced users unprecedented control over configuring every aspect of the system.

While still in development, the OpenWrt Project is working on reference firmware specifications with extra features aimed at around $100 retail routers. But Banana Pi has gotten ahead of the game by taking its existing OpenWrt-compatible hardware and packaging it up as a ready-to-go product.

That said, it's important to note that the BPI-WiFi runs a fork of OpenWrt maintained by Banana Pi, rather than the mainline upstream version. The device may therefore not be the fastest in receiving the latest features or security patches compared to official releases. According to the GitHub log, the code was written seven months ago.

Still, for buyers seeking extreme value and open-source flexibility, Banana Pi's new Wi-Fi 6 offering could be the perfect match, delivering cutting-edge wireless performance and Gigabit Ethernet at an unbeatable price point. At the moment, this router is only available from sites like AliExpress, but who knows, maybe this could expand to wider availability if demand validates the ultra-low-cost concept.