Intel Wireless 7260 as an access point

Vincent Bernat

My home router acts as an ac­cess point with an In­tel Dual-Band Wire­less-AC 7260 wire­less card. This card sup­ports 802.11ac (on the 5 GHz band) and 802.11n (on both the 5 GHz and 2.4 GHz band). While this seems a very de­cent card to use in man­aged mode, this is not re­ally a great choice for an ac­cess point.

$ lspci -k -nn -d 8086:08b1
03:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Intel Corporation Wireless 7260 [8086:08b1] (rev 73)
        Subsystem: Intel Corporation Dual Band Wireless-AC 7260 [8086:4070]
        Kernel driver in use: iwlwifi

TL;DR

Use an Atheros card instead.

Limitations#

First, the card is said to be “dual-band” but you can only use one band at a time be­cause there is only one ra­dio. Al­most all wire­less cards have this lim­i­ta­tion. If you want to use both the 2.4 GHz band and the less crowded 5 GHz band, two cards are usu­ally needed.

5 GHz band#

There is no sup­port to set an ac­cess point on the 5 GHz band. The firmware doesn’t al­low it. This can be checked with iw:

$ iw reg get
country CH: DFS-ETSI
  (2402 - 2482 @ 40), (N/A, 20), (N/A)
  (5170 - 5250 @ 80), (N/A, 20), (N/A)
  (5250 - 5330 @ 80), (N/A, 20), (0 ms), DFS
  (5490 - 5710 @ 80), (N/A, 27), (0 ms), DFS
  (57240 - 65880 @ 2160), (N/A, 40), (N/A), NO-OUTDOOR
$ iw list
Wiphy phy0
[…]
Band 2:
  Capabilities: 0x11e2
    HT20/HT40
    Static SM Power Save
    RX HT20 SGI
    RX HT40 SGI
    TX STBC
    RX STBC 1-stream
    Max AMSDU length: 3839 bytes
    DSSS/CCK HT40
  Frequencies:
    * 5180 MHz [36] (20.0 dBm) (no IR)
    * 5200 MHz [40] (20.0 dBm) (no IR)
    * 5220 MHz [44] (20.0 dBm) (no IR)
    * 5240 MHz [48] (20.0 dBm) (no IR)
    * 5260 MHz [52] (20.0 dBm) (no IR, radar detection)
      DFS state: usable (for 192 sec)
      DFS CAC time: 60000 ms
    * 5280 MHz [56] (20.0 dBm) (no IR, radar detection)
      DFS state: usable (for 192 sec)
      DFS CAC time: 60000 ms
[…]

While the 5 GHz band is al­lowed by the CRDA, all fre­quen­cies are marked with no IR. Here is the ex­pla­na­tion for this flag:

The no-ir flag ex­ists to al­low reg­u­la­tory do­main def­i­ni­tions to dis­al­low a de­vice from ini­ti­at­ing ra­di­a­tion of any kind and that in­cludes us­ing bea­cons, so for ex­am­ple AP/IBSS/Mesh/GO in­ter­faces would not be able to ini­ti­ate com­mu­ni­ca­tion on these chan­nels un­less the chan­nel does not have this flag.

Multiple SSID#

This card can only ad­ver­tise one SSID. Man­ag­ing sev­eral of them is use­ful to set up dis­tinct wire­less net­works, like a pub­lic ac­cess (routed to Tor), a guest ac­cess and a pri­vate ac­cess. iw can con­firm this:

$ iw list
[…]
valid interface combinations:
   * #{ managed } <= 1, #{ AP, P2P-client, P2P-GO } <= 1, #{ P2P-device } <= 1,
     total <= 3, #channels <= 1

Here is the out­put of an Atheros card able to man­age 8 SSIDs:

$ iw list
[…]
valid interface combinations:
   * #{ managed, WDS, P2P-client } <= 2048, #{ IBSS, AP, mesh point, P2P-GO } <= 8,
     total <= 2048, #channels <= 1

Configuration as an access point#

Ex­cept for these two lim­i­ta­tions, the card works fine as an ac­cess point. Here is the con­fig­u­ra­tion that I use for hostapd:

interface=wlan-guest
driver=nl80211

# Radio
ssid=XXXXXXXXX
hw_mode=g
channel=11

# 802.11n
wmm_enabled=1
ieee80211n=1
ht_capab=[HT40-][SHORT-GI-20][SHORT-GI-40][DSSS_CCK-40][DSSS_CCK-40][DSSS_CCK-40]

# WPA
auth_algs=1
wpa=2
wpa_passphrase=XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
wpa_key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
wpa_pairwise=TKIP
rsn_pairwise=CCMP

Be­cause of the use of chan­nel 11, only 802.11n HT40- rate can be en­abled. Look at the Wikipedia page for 802.11n to check if you can use ei­ther HT40-, HT40+ or both.

Up­date (2026-06)

A mod­ern al­ter­na­tive is an MT7916 DBDC mini-PCIe card (like the AsiaRF AW7916-NPD). It has two ra­dios to sup­port both bands si­mul­ta­ne­ously and sup­ports 16 SSIDs.