I’m new to the community and I bought a FW16 in batch 4.
I was upgrading my home network to Wifi7, and I wanted to upgrade my FW16 to Wifi7.
I read through the forums looking which applicable M.2 WLAN module. There were a lot of posts, and I saw that some people were having mixed results with various chipsets. Most of the posts were from people running Linux distros, which wasn’t really relevant (driver/software-wise for me).
I took a chance and purchased a Qualcomm QCNCM865 WLAN module and installed it in my FW16. It took a bit of digging to find a compatible Win11 driver.
I found the driver by first looking for newer laptops / devices that have the same chipset as mine (in this case a MSI Herald Wifi 7 card), then searched their support sections for the compatible driver - as Qualcomm are OEM only and do not provide drivers direct to public.
Definitely going to have to keep this in mind. I just recently moved and had to buy a new wireless router and went with a WI-FI 7 router. This already provides an upgrade to my FW16 since it comes with a WI-FI 6E module but I’d like to upgrade that to WI-FI 7 in the future.
I will give a further note on this. This likely more of an issue with Windows than framework but if you are planning on doing this yourself, delete all bluetooth connections prior to removing and then installing the new module. Otherwise you may find yourself with stuck drivers and broken bluetooth connections requiring some registry key manipulation to “fix”. I’m still having issues connecting a pair of headphones since they wont allow me to delete in the bluetooth menu.
Again I think this is a windows issue with replacing hardware. At some point I will reinstall windows and report back.
When I tried running this card I couldn’t get bluetooth audio to work. Also wifi speeds weren’t great. I ordered the same wifi module. Are there any other settings to tweak for best performance?
Software-wise, no, i just used the windows defaults (Win 11 Pro).
One thing to check: Did you connect the antenna connector to the correct colour connectors (black to black, white to white)? Compared with the Framework default Wifi6 pci-e card the black and white antenna connectors were reversed, which required some finessing to get in place and connected.
For me Speedtest network speeds were ~1400Mbps - which is below but in line with my hardware Ubiquiti Unifi Wifi 7 Pro, which uses a 2.5Gbps uplink.
Yea, I just reinstalled it again to try both drivers a second time. Wifi seems Ok Im also using a U7 Pro Max. Seem similar to previous speeds. But I can’t get bluetooth audio to work. Also, I just tried to play a youtube video and it just pauses after playing. Does bluetooth audio work for you?
I was able to fix the audio issues, not sure why it wasn’t working but probably from switching from the framework standard wifi to ax210 then to the new one. It was messing up some stuff. I ran windows troubleshooter and it fixed it somehow.
The Windows 11 2H24 update made the original driver stop working, but (using the same MSI link) and update driver has been posted and is working for me.
On speedtest.net, I’m only getting ~1,300 Mbps speeds, but that’s more a function of my internet connection.