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by malcolmputer 3701 days ago
Looks like the rpi3 may have onboard ethernet and wifi, but it's still just one ethernet (100Mbit to boot) and single band wifi.

The point still stands that a $30 router blows away a rpi in terms of network connectivity (which should matter for a router).

1 comments

Sadly, no, the Raspberry Pi 3 still seems to do everything over the USB bus. It'd make an awful router. See https://www.raspberrypi.org/magpi/raspberry-pi-3-specs-bench...:

> The Raspberry Pi 3 shares the same SMSC LAN9514 chip as its predecessor, the Raspberry Pi 2, adding 10/100 Ethernet connectivity and four USB channels to the board. As before, the SMSC chip connects to the SoC via a single USB channel, acting as a USB-to-Ethernet adaptor and USB hub.

> Sadly, no, the Raspberry Pi 3 still seems to do everything over the USB bus. It'd make an awful router

Not exactly, the BT/WiFi chip is apparently running via SDIO.

But yes, that doesn't help with the Ethernet situation. I don't get why Broadcom, when they already do a custom SoC, didn't include one or two MII lines and use a real Ethernet PHY instead.

They wouldn't even need to buy in IP for the Ethernet MAC, they already have their own.