[Make-wifi-fast] Open Wifi ap with 10 GigE uplink?

[dpreed@reed.com]

Just got the new 16 port UBNT 10 GigE managed aggregation switch for my home lab. Amazingly inexpensive! MSRP < $600, Street price potentially lots lower. Just two 8 port chips in the switch, and a little management circuity.

I have other uses  for this piece of kit in the short term (SDR with gigasample per sec remote ADC and DAC, and a backplane interconnect for my home HPC cluster, which already uses direct 10 GigE links), but it occurred to me that we don't have good open AP gear with uplinks above 1 gigabit/sec capacity, even though the air rates on dual band 802.11ac APs are now higher than 1 gig by a lot.

So it occurred to me that there should be a way to build inexpensive open 10 GigE APs. The home router market isn't there, but the enterprise market is.

Anyone have pointers to boards or components smaller than PCIe x8 form factor? I am really interested. I suppose it possible that there is open source IP core for a 10 gig interface on a Xilinx FPGA or something else that could have a mini-pcie wifi chip for the air interface.

Near term, NVmE drives over WiFi would be convenient, since they can consume and generate data at comparable rates, and are now dropping to very low costs.