Uh? I thought Broadcom and Infineon made very solid stuff...

Pi is build from cheapest components!

Broadcom is famous for their terrible Linux support (typical android style binary firmware blob dump). Many drivers are unofficial, only reverse engineered. Some commenter here even mentions patching binary blobs to fix issues!

Murata Type1GC mentioned here, goes back to 2015. It also has several compromises to keep size small. Hardly stellar config!

Well the Pi isn’t trying to be expensive or high end. But it’s generally pretty stable tho.

What would you recommend instead that fulfills a similar role?

it's not like you have an option (out of china)

Question for those with more experience - I’ve just purchased a Pi Zero 2 and I’ve been having real issues with the WiFi since I opened the box. Is it likely a faulty device?

It should connect and stay connected for 1 hour or so. Network transfer speed should be at least 1MBps.

It is quite possible unit is fine, but there is just interference at your place. Those small antennas are not good at dealing with it.

Thanks. Will try moving to about to see how it goes.

To follow up, I moved the device to be right near the access point and it worked ok. So now I need to figure out what I’m going to do when it’s in situ…

probably.

bottom barrel price hardware components usually mean top quality component that failed QA and then went on a lower quality bin and then passed QA there.

it's not a different design or anything. the car analogy would be all factories making only 4x4 cars and the cheap cars just being the 4x4 with the trans axle broken or something, resulting in two wheel drive (doesn't even care which two wheel because the cheap bin QA just test if the car moved). you probably got a chip with two trans axle broken and the chip limped with one wheel drive thru QA and they called it a day.

thanks artificial Monopoly protections via bogus IP laws.

Broadcom at least are certainly capable of making reliable network devices, their switch ASICs [0] are very common.

[0] - https://www.broadcom.com/products/ethernet-connectivity/swit...

I don't know if I'd call Airoc (Infineon) "solid," but they're the least cursed standalone Wi-Fi+BT modules I'm aware of.

There's always WINC1500 or ESP-AT if you want your product to be trapped in the stone age.

Ahhh I wanted to use the esp32, and thus the esp-at for some specific stuff, but I'm a bit clueless about what else is available and what I'd be missing. What are the more stone agey parts of it?

An obnoxious mountain of binary blobs, no 5 GHz, no WPA3, and if you plan on using Bluetooth, you're gonna have to re-flash the ESP every time you want to add a new GATT attribute.

After the i225 intel fiasco I don’t have much faith in them being much better.

I think days of good support from intel on linux are gone unfortunately. Try finding an AP capable intel chip with Wifi6 for example and even older chips are a bit of a shitshow. My iwlwifi driver fails to bring up the bluetooth controller in 1/10 cases (both after power up or sleep).

AX201s have always worked perfectly for me.

The ax201 does not support AP mode, AFAIK none of the recent Intel cards do.

No AP mode for Intel cards:

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000...