Compex's march upwards in price has been absurd. The 3x3 wifi-5 cards were like $75 originally. I don't know how much Qualcomm is to blame here but all one can get a 4x4 cards now and they're almost all well over $200. With absurd constraints that make them hard to use in a normal system (weird shape, weird power needs).
It's also just so so striking to me that it's been most of a decade with Compex as the only company making add-on cards. There are some clones (Wallystech), but there's just like no market here. Qualcomm clearly Does Not Give A Fuck about selling chips to anyone else. No one else cares about add-on cards. The whole access-point market perpetuates on the vastest wave of apathy & disregard.
Don't forget that they don't really make those cards for "us". Their target market iirc is industrial systems/whatever. Probably if you buy a lot of 1000 cards price point is different than in online shop.
> With absurd constraints that make them hard to use in a normal system (weird shape, weird power needs).
hahaha. i had one AP built with pcie > minipcie attached to custom bracket to hold extra large card. and 5v stolen from sata port.
when it came time to rebuild it, i just gave up and went the route i described above.
So now I run as router/everything x86 with a bunch of 10g/sfp ports and a couple of r7800 flashed with openwrt as purely AP