Is Start9 a well known company? The page by itself seems indistinguishable from a scam, but maybe they have a reputation that justifies their asking for $250,000?
Turris Omnia NG is also "open source" and has 2x 10 Gbps SFP+ and 4x 2.5 Gbps ethernet ports. StartWRT and Turris OS are both forks of OpenWRT, which is kind of annoying. The Turris project has been around a long time and has an active community.
RISC-V is quite wimpy this far, so it’s not even clear if it can saturate a gigabit with features turned on. The one benefit is that it doesn’t have Intel IME/AMT, AMD PSP or ARM TrustZone backdoors built-in, but I would be extremely surprised if the Chinese SpaceMiT CPU didn’t have Chinese backdoors of its own.
Are the banana pi boards able to run a mainline kernel or close to it? I have a memory of getting real close to buying one of those, and then reading a comment on HN about having to run their Frankenstein setup
Given the similarities in port layout (just missing a HDMI and USB3 header), and that the case is nearly identical, I would guess that this router probably is a custom run of the exact same BananaPi board without those headers. Both also use MiniPCIe in 2026, which is a bit of an odd decision.
> Ethernet: 1 WAN Gb, 1 LAN Gb
> $250000
Awesome.
https://docs.banana-pi.org/en/BPI-F3/BananaPi_BPI-F3
Is it doing anything different ? I assume at least made in US so it can be sold as router and not dev board ?
Really? In 2026? Pass.
It needs to be _at_ _least_ two SFP+.