It seems unusual to pick a Mediatek SoC, if the goal is open source compatibility. It would have made much more sense to go with an Atheros SoC and Atheros modems, which can be used with no proprietary binaries whatsoever.
I was thinking the same thing. Atheros has been very good with Open Source friendly hardware documentation and licensing.
The downside is that most of the Atheros chips have a single <1Ghz MIPS core, when most of the rest of the router SoC market is switching to multi core 1GHz+ ARM devices, or is focused on other parts of the device space.
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It seems unusual to pick a Mediatek SoC, if the goal is open source compatibility. It would have made much more sense to go with an Atheros SoC and Atheros modems, which can be used with no proprietary binaries whatsoever.
I was thinking the same thing. Atheros has been very good with Open Source friendly hardware documentation and licensing.
The downside is that most of the Atheros chips have a single <1Ghz MIPS core, when most of the rest of the router SoC market is switching to multi core 1GHz+ ARM devices, or is focused on other parts of the device space.
isn't there binaries burned onto the chip?