With 7.23.2, I had wifi connection drops. These are gone since 7.24rc1, and connections are stable. However, with 7.24rc I see occasional kernel crashes, which lead to an automatic reboot, resulting in ~1 min disconnection and a new DFS check before 5GHz wifi comes up again. rc2 was around one reboot per day, with rc3 it went down to aprox. once per week. I cannot say anything yet for rc4, which just came out yesterday.
MLO was unstable until incl. 7.24rc2, so I disabled it. With 7.24rc3, MLO is stable, but wifi throughput is slower with MLO, so I keep it disabled. I do not see any significant advantage of MLO anyway, since roaming from 5GHz to 2.4GHz is pretty fast and seamless, and max. wifi throughput is CPU limited and cannot benefit from MLO.
No problems with wifi coverage so far, and perfectly within my expectations. I have the impression that it is slightly better than the ax2 I used before, and covers the ~100qm area it is supposed to cover without issues.
No cooling issues. CPU temperature is around 63°C at 29°C ambient temperature.
The device uses only ~5W idle (with one LAN cable connected) and up to 8.5W with full wifi load.
I have a comparison to the ax2. However, I use both devices as access point (AP) only, since I have an opnsense for routing and firewalling.
In my setting, I have chosen the be lite as main AP and moved the ax2 to a secondary area. Reason is that the wifi throughput is significantly better with the be lite due to the 160MHz band width in 5GHz.
Maximum wifi throughput of the be lite is ~850mbit/s, CPU limited. I see numbers up to 750mbit/s even through one wall, all measured with iperf3 in local network. Typical throughput is between 450-750mbit/s in a crowded neighborhood.
For lan connections, ports 2 to 4 are HW offloaded and do switching at line speed independent of device load, even with vlans in place, which is great.
The picture changes when transferring from port 1 to the other lan ports, since the traffic has to go through the cpu then. In this case, I see speed decreasing on lan when wifi is at full load, probably due to the cpu reaching its limits. On idle/low wifi load, it operates at line speed with one lan port connected (1gbit/s).
As a result, the 2.5gbit/s lan 1 port only makes limited sense. Wifi will not go beyond 850mbit/s, individual lan ports are limited to 1gbit/s. With traffic on both wifi and one lan port, you can get somewhat above 1gbit on port 1, but utilizing the full 2,5gbit might only be possible without high wifi load and utilizing all the lan ports in parallel, which I did not test.
After receiving the be lite I have tested it as router in default config. Basically I see very similar throughput to what I see without any firewall rules as access point, which I think is pretty good given its limited CPU resources.
Seeing the reports about high idle power consumption and heat problems with the be3, I canceled my plans to eventually upgrade to the be3 for now and will stick with the be lite as main AP. I believe that the reboot issues will be finally resolved soon, and in real world it is acceptable for me. No complaints from my family members either.
In total, the be lite is not a device to fall in love with for me. But it is one of those compromises that are simply good enough for the job and hence stay in place, because it just works. So yes, after several weeks of real world experience, I would buy this device again.
replacing AP seamlessly.
