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ginko
Accujack
The manufacturers are mostly run by people who were trained in "standard" corporate governance. This includes the ways to protect corporate revenue streams by suppressing (legally, of course) competition, delivering a range of products by producing the top end model and crippling it to sell at a cheaper price point, and repeatedly reducing costs to increase profits in a "race to the bottom".
Until a new set of management philosophies is adopted for teaching, a large number of companies will keep doing the same thing, because in general corporate managers have a lead time associated with them, and we won't run out of the old school ones until 20+ years after philosophies change.
This is an opportunity for anyone who can do things differently, of course.
stereolambda
I see all this as a heartwarming story where a company was forced, with a "trap" set by GPL and its philosophy, to offer people for once a square deal: good hardware, fairly priced, you are free to do with it what you want. All this serves human needs better and the manufacturer could in fact turn a profit.
There is a faint, faint glimmer of hope that this is a peek of the far future of our techno-political-economic system. Of course with very different laws around intellectual property, company governance, customer protection, terms of participating in the market etc. We might be as far from it as the Enlightenment in 1750 (in a world built on overt serfdom and not even fully developed colonialism) was from the year 2000, but still. Makes me feel a teensy bit better about doing the right thing today, just because.
h2odragon
See how drones and 3d printers are evolving; who could fund the firmware development? who could fund the research? but now these cutting edge things are necessarily public and cannot both be a military advantage and cutting edge.
pjmlp
On the other hand this kind of "mistakes" are what is driving the new generation of POSIX clones for IoT untainted by GPL, like Azure RTOS, NuttX, Zephyr, RTOS,...
woofie11
I'm firmly convinced that if a Chinese maker made a 100% open source keyboard or mouse, they could sell that for $30 instead of $3, and establish a global brand to boot.
Same thing for a lot of hardware, actually. Printers. Scanners. Etc.
gens
http://www.miniware.com.cn/product/ts100-soldering-iron-pack...
An open source soldering iron, original by a Chinese company Miniware. I don't know how good their sales are, but the iron is so good it got that Louis Rossmann praised it (for the price, ofc). And it seems to be very popular (probably not nearly as much as Weller, but hey).
Decade
Isn’t that basically Keyboardio? Except it’s a San Francisco company selling them for $150; expensive, but still within reason for boutique mechanical keyboards.
KirillPanov
That's what gl.inet is (weird name though).
jacobr1
They can't though. Because if it was really open source, then another firm could just sell if for $3. Of course fabrication itself complicates things, but the gist remains.
whatusername
The Creality Ender 3 is Open Source I believe.
It's working on their brand - but isn't selling for a 10X price premium.
ownagefool
Your standard bigco manager also believes a whole bunch of FUD about the lack of OSS secrity and what not, but it's 20 years unless upstarts eat their market.
Probably more likely for your average software company than hardware, but I suspect there's an inflection point in cheap hardware.
sonotmyname
You can buy a new WRT today that supports FOSS firmware out of the box - https://www.linksys.com/us/wireless-routers/c/wrt-wireless-r...
And yet Linksys (and others) still sell their closed routers as well. One can only concluded that the Open Source support, while important for a niche group, is not enough for market dominance...
rossy
I bought one of these (WRT1900ACS) when I was working from home last year. It's good, but not great. Before anyone else buys one of these for their open source "support," you should know that Linksys/Marvell basically threw a buggy open source WiFi driver over the wall, failed to upstream it to the Linux kernel due to issues with the code, and abandoned it.
Although it works fine for my simple purposes, there's a discussion of some of its issues at the end of this PR: https://github.com/openwrt/openwrt/pull/2397
m463
I have one and it works great for me. I'm not a heavy wifi user, mostly I want openwrt.
I've had several openwrt routers. Before this one I had a tp-link wdr4300, then an archer c7. The wrt1900acs has pretty fast, full-featured hardware.
I run firewall + adblock + privoxy + vlans. Because it has a USB port, I've added a USB GPS dongle so it does gps-based ntp time.
At first openwrt was a little daunting, but it has really grown on me.
One great thing about it is that the entire linux distribution is basically read-only, and all changes you make to your machine are in an infrequently-written overlay filesystem. If you back up /overlay/upper you will have all your config changes in a small tarball. All operations that do continuous writing like logfiles go to ramdisk, so it's easy on the flash and reliable during power failure.
Another thing is that if you follow the instructions, it's actually pretty straightforward to build openwrt for your specific configuration. I cut out the package manager and compiled everything I wanted into my image (or out of it, I turned off ipv6)
With a simple setup, you don't even have to bother with the gui. The config files are pretty simple and you can edit them directly.
I've also put openwrt on some network switches and once I got vlans going, my network got a lot more manageable.
I have a vlans:
- normal - machines can route to internet
- restricted - machines boot and have local dns - can get out (updates) only through the proxy
- test vlan - can't get to anything
the network switches are mikrotik and also running openwrt.
I have retired a rb750gl and rb2011ils, and now everything runs on a rb2011uias and a rb3011uias-rm (11 port)
I love the rb3011 - the rack mount tabs can be rotated 90 degrees and you can attach it under a shelf.
The two switches have SFP, and I can't help but think I should start messing with fiber.
hinkley
Linksys is owned by Cisco, and I don't know what they do now, but at the time a Cisco low-end router had no specialty hardware to run a lot of their features. Those features were implemented in software.
So openwrt threatens their entry level and some of their mid-range devices, creating a conflict of interests.
filmgirlcw
Cisco hasn’t owned Linksys since 2013. Belkin bought it from Cisco and kept the brand.
clashandcarry
Linksys is currently owned by Foxconn.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/26/17166272/foxconn-buys-bel...
hhh
I had a WRT1900AC for several years. It was a very nice product, with very good community support.
Official support, however, was not good in my experience. Several years later I finally bought a Ubiqui Dream Machine Pro, and absolutely love it. Kinda miffed that they suffered a breach a month after I bought it, though.
merlinscholz
I recently sold my UDMP and bought some mikrotik gear, because the device hat very tight limits on what ubiquiti wants you to do with it. No wireguard was an annoyance I could live with, but disabling NAT was not possible and a switch backplane running at 1gbps were the final blow. Also I do not want to have to log into an online account to use my (maybe airgapped) router.
lostlogin
I’ve dithered on the UDM-P, the reviews are very mixed.
I’m in a strange place with UniFi as a whole, as my APs are limiting download speeds to about 275mbps while upload speed is line speed, as is wired speed. There is lots on forums and Reddit about strange issues like this with Ubiquiti and they could really do with some firming up of their software.
nwmcsween
Ubiquiti hardware is an great but their software has some of the worst QA I've seen in my life, the forum is basically an continuously ignored issue tracker where I've found dozens of problems I'm having with no solutions (about 200 aps and 150 switches/routers). Ubiquiti software is absolutely abysmal.
jcpham2
still rocking the wrt1900 and openwrt/lede
the_arun
When I bought my WRT few years ago it was like $50. The one you have shared is like $150+. Why are routers so expensive for doing one simple thing?
i_am_proteus
I would expect an AC3200 router to be more expensive than a WRT54GL (which is $40 today). More capable hardware with a more expensive BOM will come at a higher price.
NullPrefix
Yes, it may very well be the most successful router ever sold, but have you thought about how many new models were NOT sold because the oldie WRT54G was chugging along all too well?
bostik
If its success has kept uncountable, "segmented" garbage devices from ever entering the market, I'd say WRT has been even better for the consumers than you think.
enchiridion
I think you both agree.
Unfortunately what is good for consumers in this case is bad for companies, because it reduces long term sales.
hungryforcodes
Certainly that's a good thing though. Conserving resources and discouraging needless waste of perfectly functional products is a good thing.
asdff
[flagged]
tandr
I would continue to buy their newer routers if they have open firmware a la WRT54G. New wifi standards came out, had to install routers for friends and family, and WRT54G itself kind of died after 3 or 4 years... (I bought a second one, but by then N standard was up and running, so 3rd was not Linksys)
Mauricebranagh
But think of the economies of scale and the $ saved in terms of RnD and marketing
mywittyname
Cisco didn't want a threat to their lucrative enterprise market.
Imagine if they kept pumping out updated hardware supporting DD-WRT over the years, and eventually captured 80+% of the home networking market. Now consider that, during that time, a generation of future networking engineers cut their teeth on hi-po Linksys home routers, giving Linksys a segue into the lucrative enterprise market as this generation of people started gaining influence.
This ended up being one of magical events that could have been the turning point for a small, unknown company to take on a giant, and win. Instead, the opportunity was squished through a smart acquisition by Cisco.
mobilio
I'm still using one WRT54GL 1.0 in rural area.
Because it just works and refuse do die.
midasuni
That’s a terrible product to sell in today’s world
undefined
unicornporn
True dat.
(Message sent via WRT54GL)
Maxburn
That's why I'm so impressed with OPNsense and pfSense and a wide selection of build it yourself hardware selection with them. You can own and tinker with your own router top to bottom. Seems like a niche market and I'm wondering why they aren't catching on with this same community that embraced the WRT.
jabl
I think those that want to run an open source software stack, but not assemble the hardware themselves, are served pretty well by going to the OpenWrt website (the successor project around the original wrt54g open source release), and choosing a suitable router from the table of hardware they maintain, and then just install openwrt on top of the stock firmware.
That's what I've been doing ever since I jumped ship from ye olde WRT54G (currently I have a Zyxel Armor Z2, and I'm happy with it).
0x0000000
FWIW, "assemble the hardware themselves" means buy a > 5 year old desktop computer and add a multi-port PCI-express NIC. Or even a USB3 -> Ethernet adapter.
Moving to pfSense was the best decision I made for my home network.
Maxburn
I never dove into the WRT devices myself but it definitely has a niche.
sq_
Wonder if there's a chance some of the router projects and Pine64 could collaborate somehow to make a fully open router. Pine64 seems to be quickly developing some production chops and the various router projects also seem to be doing great work.
zajio1am
PC Engines makes a long-term series of pretty open router boards that works with vanilla Debian, current iteration is APU2: https://www.pcengines.ch/apu2.htm
It is pricier than low-end router, but they are high performance and are much easier to use.
yellowapple
If Pine64 threw a bunch of Ethernet ports into a Clusterboard that'd be a pretty killer platform for a router. Start with one SOPINE for the actual router stuff, then add more for things like NAS, print servers, home streaming, home automation, etc.
pimeys
Turris Omnia is supposedly one of these routers. I have their old model from a few years back, and it's been serving quite well for all my needs. The OS is their custom version of OpenWRT, and you can do stuff like LXC, Wireguard and all that quite easily.
The only problem is the ARMv7 hardware, which doesn't really cut it with modern Internet speeds anymore, especially with Wireguard.
That said, I can't wait for pfSense and opnSense finally support Wireguard. And pihole should finally get a FreeBSD version. I'd much more prefer the sense systems over the wrt, but the time is not yet here.
Maxburn
ANY more work in this space would be great. The SG1100 seems similar already though. Most configs of the Pine64 I'm looking at are single Ethernet port though, I'm not a fan of the router on stick config, even the one in the SG1100 is confusing internally.
harha
I would love to see some more prebuilt pfsense boxes with useful options (like built-in 4G) - there are some on Amazon without detailed specs and some small vendors that don’t feel like shipping in all of the EU (can’t blame them for the regulatory and tax challenges).
Maxburn
I believe the underlying BSD is the issue here, everyone that says they tried to do it says it is an awful experience. Similar story for the problems with realtek Ethernet chips.
e_proxus
TekLager is a Swedish shop that has a fe quite nice options.
unethical_ban
On the other hand, Ubiquiti has given end users an option for business class wireless and routing that wasn't available. You want a "real" router in 2005? eBay > Cisco.
ip26
It's funny, Ubiquiti keeps getting talked up on HN, but every time I try to shop for their equipment out of curiosity, it's basically panned everywhere else. Don't know what to make of it.
tda
Yep, that's because it is a mixed bag. Certainly a step up from normal consumer grade stuff, and not as expensive as 'real' enterprise hardware. Had a lot of promise, and lots of hn folks like myself converted.
But I said had, because in 2020 the company seems to have transformed into a money-grabbing shitshow. Cloud for everything, deprecating fine hardware and fine software in favor of unneeded cloud stuff. Crappy firmwares with no easy way to rollback. CEO is supposedly running the company in the ground with outsourcing, constant crunch etc. There are some disgruntled ex ubiquity employees here and on reddit, if even half is true of what they say the company really needs to turn around soon, it is probably already to late.
na85
I have ubiquiti gear for my home network. It's pretty good for what it is, which is basically "consumer networking gear for power users" but I'm not sure I'd use ubiquiti to do serious networking for an enterprise environment. Maybe a small business/doctor's office type of environment.
jandrese
If you're doing serious business with your WiFi then the UBNT stuff is probably not quite good enough.
I have one of the flying saucer shaped APs, but it's super old and only does B/G. It was under a hundred bucks and unlike my old APs it doesn't get angry at certain devices and deauth them randomly from the network. Or other APs I've used that start disconnecting users once you have more than 15 devices connected at once. The configuration software is a bloated Java daemon that I have to manually start then connect to with a client. It's not all that user friendly, but I've been around networks enough to get it working.
So it's basically the cheapest AP that isn't regularly malfunctioning consumer garbage.
icelancer
I use a pfsense box (check comments for link) but Ubiquiti gear for WiFi APs/controller/PoE/switches. Been very happy with the setup despite the latest concerns with them posted here.
Their security gateways are universally hated on, and for good reason - one major one is that enabling DPI causes a ridiculous drop in throughput rate, even on the newer machines (which also have faulty firmware). Stay away from them.
atombender
Me neither. I switched out my trusty old Microtik AC router for a combination of a Unifi AP AC Pro and UniFi Security Gateway in order to get a bit more distance, and performance and reliability has been shoddy.
I eventually got a TP-Link WiFi 6 AX3000, and it's been super solid, significantly faster, and required almost zero manual setup. The Unifi itself required a PoE adapter and a router, and of course needs the controller application to do anything.
(The controller app with its easily-corrupted and hard-to-upgrade MongoDB database is perhaps the worst part of it. My two devices occasionally required re-"adopting" for no discernible reason. I was unable to upgrade the controller at one point because apparently (?) they stopped bundling MongoDB, and the controller refused to use the version I installed manually. Of course, this breakage happened after the software updated, so the only way to fix it was by restoring the old version and database files from backups.)
Maybe Ubiquiti products make more sense when you need dozens of access points across a big building, but definitely not in a small city apartment.
unethical_ban
I work in IT, and I and several others use UBNT. I have not had any reliability issues, but you do not want to be hasty with version upgrades unless you need it to fix a bug. Read release notes.
I have an Edgemax ER-Lite router and a UAC-AP-Pro access point, and a security camera for testing.
If you can, it's best to stick with one lineup of products. Unifi is one line, edgemax is another, amplifi is another, and so on - having one management plane is optimal. I have thought about getting a Unifi router so everything is done through one control center, but I don't need to.
tl;dr - I think they are great for the money. You can do advanced stuff with the routers as well, like VPN gateways and BGP if needed, but not always easily in the GUI.
lotsofpulp
I don’t think there’s any good options outside of commercial brands. If my Airport Time Machine and Extreme die, I’ll probably switch to premium Netgear equipment.
Meraki would be nice except Cisco owns it now and they are experts at milking you with annual fees.
Mister_Snuggles
/r/homelab, which is where I heard about it, seems to like it.
I've had UniFi equipment for a while now and am generally happy with it, though I'm not doing anything terribly crazy. Well, maybe crazy for a home user, but not nearly as crazy as some of the /r/homelab folks get.
I've got multiple VLANs, firewall rules controlling traffic, multiple WiFi networks. I'm using 2 switches (8 port 150W PoE, 24 port non-PoE), a USG, and an AP AC Pro. It all works fine.
My only complaint is that the new version of the controller software rearranged all of the settings and I haven't figured out where everything lives.
gcblkjaidfj
> It just doesn't make sense to me.
you probably typed that, and everyone here will read on a macbook, which just switched from bash to zsh to avoid GPL. On a BSD kernel to avoid GPL. with browser and OS build by a compiler that had to receive tons of features to catch up with the GPL one. On browsers that were built on top of GPL (chrome) and LGPL (safari) engines but that magically become BSD along the way.
All the evidence suggest Open source is a toxic gold mine for corporations.
walrus01
If you really want a small fully open source router these days, you can build your own VyOS (evolution of Vyatta) install ISO, which is fully open source, and install it on some small x86-64 system with multiple 1/10GbE interfaces. Or install pfsense, which is also fully open source.
pyvpx
because working through the absolute trash fire that has been closed source merchant silicon SDKs was/is a competitive advantage.
things like P4 will move the competitive advantages farther up the stack where they belong
throwaway1999x
So, I worked for Broadcom for some years after this went down. This post is purely descriptive to give people some insight into the history from inside the company; I'm not commenting on who should have done what (although I was not directly involved, so if someone who was comments, take their word over mine).
Broadcom made an error of judgement here, but this incident fostered a deep distrust of open source, at senior levels, that persisted for more than a decade after; perhaps to this day.
Firstly at this point Cisco was, at the time, Broadcom's largest customer by a large margin. This caused huge tension in that relationship that was totally unforseen, and was very painful for a while.
Secondly, a at a certain point it dawned on Cisco and Broadcom that the GPL lawsuit was not like a normal business dispute , because businessmen after a certain point will settle for money even if they didn't get everything they want. Sure a few people will keep going to the detriment of their own business, but most aim to make profit, not expound a principle. Many companies in the position of the FSF would have settled for a cut of the revenue. But the FSF wanted the source code released, and they were prepared to kill the business to get it. So Cisco and Broadcom had to concede. The source code was released, and OpenWRT was born.
The fallout, though was that subsequently Broadcom router ICs were designed with hardware accelerators which were separate from the main CPU. They were driven by separate CPUs on the same SoC that did not run linux and whose drivers could not be demanded under the GPL. none of the open source firmwares can run these devices efficiently unless someone spends weeks reverse engineering them.
d1zzy
I'm not sure about the last point. I would think hardware dedicated accelerators were done because it was the cheapest way to achieve that performance not because it allowed to somehow bypass GPL. However, choosing to not run Linux but some proprietary OS could most certainly have something to do with that.
At the end of the day, was it a good thing? I would say it was. It opened many generations of home router hardware to being modded/replaced with user controlled software. It even created a market of its own where certain consumer router hardware is advertised as being designed to run custom/third-party software and where vendors themselves ship with some heavily modified software and release the sources for it from day 1 (which are the only wifi routers I shop for these days).
throwaway1999x
Indeed, hardware accelerators weren't introduced because of the GPL. What changed was that previously they were connected to the main cpu and driven by drivers that fell under the GPL; to avoid the GPL secondary CPUs were introduced not running linux at all.
wtallis
I can't speak to Broadcom's motivations, but the end result has certainly been that they are the least open source-friendly WiFi vendor, behind Qualcomm-Atheros, Mediatek, Marvell and Intel (client only). When Linksys wanted to do a successor to the WRT54 series trading on its open source reputation, Broadcom wasn't an option because they've made themselves the NVIDIA of WiFi.
ryandrake
I don’t know why WiFi AP manufacturers don’t just give up and just use stock open source firmware on their devices. They are not even trying to get the sw right. The first thing I do when buying one anymore is ditch the built in tinker-toy firmware and install an open source one. Lots of companies that make hardware treat software as just another line item on the BOM like a bolt or a screw, and source the cheapest shit they can find, rather than treating the software as an integral part of the product that needs the same polish as the external box and marketing materials.
sleavey
FRITZboxes are better in terms of their software. The names and descriptions for the various controls are written in proper language, and there are loads of graphs and stats for the nerds. My only gripes are that the interface relies too much on JavaScript (you get sent back to the login when you refresh the page...) and that, at least on my model, there is no way to perform a factory reset without plugging in a phone handset (who has one of those these days!).
Of course, OpenWRT still kills it in terms of support for standards. FRITZboxes have their own stupid mesh protocol that's only compatible with other FRITZboxes, not implementing e.g. 802.11s.
maweki
To be fair, the FRITZ suite also wants to (and does) support Cable internet (afaik the only non-ISP-supplied modem or router-modem you could even buy in europe), DECT, and a range of 433MHz home automation products. And of course, you mentioned their homebrew mesh stuff.
So there's a lot of non-standard tech available in those boxes and it is no huge surprise that this is kept proprietary.
collinmanderson
IQRouter[0] uses OpenWRT, or at least is based on something like OpenWRT, and by default measures your bandwidth so it can manage traffic to reduce congestion. Recommended by Jim Gettys[1]. I've been pretty happy with it.
IshKebab
Probably because they can ensure their software works properly. I recently dug out an old Asus RT-N16 and the latest Tomato firmwares are all completely broken. WAN DHCP doesn't work. Took me a couple of hours to figure out. Turns out it was broken a year or two ago and nobody has noticed (it's a pretty old router; I doubt anyone still uses it). The official firmware worked fine.
The point is the manufacturers have a much higher incentive to ensure everything works than open source developers.
The ASUS firmware at least seems to support way more features than Tomato did, at least without resorting to the command line. E.g. my ISP requires the VLAN ID to be set. I doubt open source router GUIs have a nice option for that.
ZoomZoomZoom
It's not that old, works tolerably for a small household if the link speed is below 100Mbps. Freshtomato worked fine last time I checked. Too bad these chips suffer performance loss with OpenWRT, though.
The sad thing is ten years later the market is still dominated by devices with half its RAM.
mook
I had a Buffalo router that did that; IIRC it came with their proprietary firmware and a copy of DD-WRT on a CD. (Might have been the other way around; this was about a decade ago.)
I don't believe they would have been in much legal issues: they'd have to make sure the copy of DD-WRT they shipped was fine, but if you get updates / flash your own, there's no reason they'd be on the hook.
toast0
There's some manufacturers doing this, or close.
https://www.gl-inet.com/ uses OpenWRT as a base for their firmware, and also provides clean images or you can install from OpenWRT images directly. Their specialty seems to be the form factor of the devices, and while they put some effort into a web frontend, and it's fine, they also make OpenWRT support a feature.
Buffalo does something similar.
asddubs
only kind of hardware where this seems to be commonplace is 3d printers. super modular in general, you can usually just swap in hardware from one machine to the next, unless it's a super commercial grade machine. I get the principle doesn't transfer as well to other devices in all cases, but I wish more stuff was like that
njharman
It's probably mostly due to legal liability. Real or perceived. It's gonna be risky to convince a jury you did your fiduciary duty to either consumers or stockholders when opposing lawyer is saying "so you subjected my client's data to you didn't even write? Code anyone one on internet can change at anytime, etc. etc.
legal is not about what is true or right or fair or probably it is about risk reduction/mitigation. A 20% chance to lose court case is too much. Or even chance of bad PR is something to be avoided.
cryptonym
Doubt... Look at all the CVE on that kind of hardware, limited liability and actual loss of control to contractors. In this case, leading to not knowing you are actually selling Open Source technology.
Look at the longevity of this router and all the features: "it was the perfect way to turn your $60 router into a $600 router". With closed firmware, you can artificially lock features and prevent everyone from adding them to cheap devices. You can also stop updating firmware after few years so everyone trash old devices and buy a new one.
Fun fact: Open Source is good for the environment.
hobofan
> You can also stop updating firmware after few years so everyone trash old devices and buy a new one.
Routers aren't really the kind of devices that become obsolete quickly though, are they? A bulk of all users will just use they one they will get from their ISP. Since the main interest of ISPs is reduce ongoing costs for support (reduce calls to hotline and sending out technicians for the setup of a new router), they should also be motivated to provide cheap, long lived routers.
boomboomsubban
If this were the issue you'd think there would already be a series of lawsuits against the free software drivers currently available.
cbozeman
LOL, Yeah like all the open-source software that drives 95% of the Internet?
If this could be done, it would have been done already.
yial
I still have one of these in a box. Maybe two as I used to encourage friends to buy them years ago.
I only stopped using it(with some custom firmware) about a year and a half ago because it was just too slow - and had gotten this weird issue where it would cut off the internet to some devices while keeping them on the network.
It was really by luck that I had one of these in my teenage years initially to play with. I sometimes wonder what hobbies I would have developed if I hadn’t lucked out and found working computer in the trash, or my parents had bought something that wasn’t such an easily moddable desktop (AMD K6-2 was the CPU in the first computer they purchased).
Anyway - the WRT54G really was a fun piece of hardware to play with.
BearOso
> because it was just too slow
The WAN to LAN throughput on a wrt54g is only like 34mbits/s. It’s just too slow to handle a fast internet connection. I guess the fact that so many are still being used shows how ISP connection speeds have stagnated.
guenthert
Or that there simply is no need for that high a bandwidth. Netflix, e.g., uses fancy compression algorithms and you can almost watch their HD offerings with ~3mbps. They do recommend 5mbps and 25mbps for their 4k content.
I so wished, I could get here a 6mbps connection for half the price of my current 65mps line.
Jonnax
So there's a need for it, it's just that you don't have a need for it.
I'm happy with my 1gbps connection where I can download a 50GB game in less than 10 minutes.
SulfurHexaFluri
You might not have a need for it but others do. It really sucks to buy a new game after work and see that you won't be able to play it that night because it has a 5 hour download time.
renewiltord
Bro, when I want to play games with friends I frequently have to update to play because I play so rarely. Speed means lower latency to startup.
joshstrange
If you still want to live that WRT life with something like OpenWRT/LEDE (I think they re-merged now just under OpenWRT but I'm running LEDE currently) then I can highly recommend this [0] updated version. I have it and I can get gigabit speeds (wired) through it just fine and don't have any issues with the wireless other than at the far, far end of my house and only sometimes.
My next router will probably be a Ubiquity setup so I can setup 2-3 AP's for full coverage and coverage out to the (detached) garage but that setup is not cheap or simple and my current issues are so minor that it will be a while before I pull the trigger on that.
rkagerer
I bought a WRT3200ACM back in 2018. I wasn't able to get Tomato flashed onto it (Shibby or FreshTomato). I've flashed Tomato onto what feels like every other router under the sun (many dozens of models with a handful of different techniques tftp included). I wound up returning it and sticking with my RT-AC3200 instead.
Do you know if the situation has changed? Or do you still have to switch to OpenWRT or similar to use it?
zerd
I'm still running a WRT54GL with Tomato firmware on at my parents place. I used it until I upgraded to a faster one, but the reason it's still running is that it provides the longest 2.4GHz range which is perfect for a large house. I've tried Ubiquity, newer ASUS routers and the range is shorter and their devices prefers to connect to the WRT54G. And my parents don't need super fast wifi, just a stable one.
WorldMaker
One fascinating sidebar in the WRT54G history was the Fon [0] "Fonera" project, which was one of the reasons I bought WRT54G specifically. (Which I found in a box just recently, Fon stickers beside it.) Fon had the idea of trying to build a network of independent residential wifi that users could share roaming among each other. It was a paid wifi network, so people that had a Fonera AP at home could opt for either free access wherever they went as benefit of running an AP or a simple profit sharing option (but then they'd pay for their own roaming).
The original Fonera projects were all built on top of OpenWRT.
It was cute idea for trying to make guest-accessible wifi ubiquitous. It ran up against shifts in law in some countries making network AP owners more personally responsible for accesses to their wifi. Also, it never really hit network effects that the scale mattered. I ran a Fonera AP through a large chunk of college/grad school and can't say that I ever saw another AP in the wild to take advantage of the free roaming (and if I had it switched to the profit-sharing mode I never would have seen a dime).
Fon pivoted entirely out of the Fonera residential wifi project in 2016. It was a neat idea, but it didn't survive.
usertrjx
I don't recall which wifi router I used, but also I setup fonera for about a week. I also don't believe I ever saw one in the wild. I thought it was an interesting idea.
bsharitt
Man I used one of those forever, I think I finally threw it out once 100Mb switch and G wifi wasn't quite enough. Tomato was probably my favorite firmware for it. I remember bricking it with a bad update one time and having to jumper two pins with a paper clip to put it in tftp mode in order to load working firmware.
bartvk
A buddy of mine got divorced and found himself in a tiny apartment with ethernet and not a router. I dug up my WRT54G but yeah, G wifi... In the end, we found an unused TP-Link Archer C7 for him, but that WRT54G brought back some memories.
EvanAnderson
The highly coveted WRT54G!
I picked up a number of these at thrift stores over the years. Occasionally I'd get lucky and get the "WRT54GL" version. I was sometimes persuaded to exceed my "$5 or less" budget for a "L" version.
They were great for having a little Linux-box to do oddball utility stuff-- ad-hoc OpenVPN endpoints, caching DNS server, captive Wi-Fi portal controller.
They were eerily solid for their built-to-a-price-point nature.
bityard
A few years back, I spotted two of these for $0.50 at the thrift store amongst all the outdated DSL modems and answering machines. My tech hoard was already large enough at that point so I made sure they worked, flashed the factory firmware, and turned around and sold them for $25 each on craigslist in under 24 hours. Easiest beer money I ever made.
geocrasher
Its spiritual successor was the Asus RTN-16. I still have one sitting on my bench, running TomatoUSB. I got it 9 years ago, and for the past 5 years it's been a 2.4ghz wifi bridge, connecting the hardwired devices in my office to the wifi router in my house. It just keeps working, so I keep using it.
Of course I can't forget the first time I got a WRT54G. My brother in law had one just sitting around unused (around 2006 I think) and while I didn't know a lot about them, I asked him about the router. I ended up trading him a well used laptop for it. The router was the locked down version. Then it died. Oh well.
temac
How is respecting the licence of software you use an accident and a problem? The managers who believe that are completely insane. Even the market segmentation theory: you can not just sell perfectly capable hardware but artificially limited by software to a very narrow set of features and pretend you care about e.g. limited natural resources. Likewise attempting to limit the hackability (and reparability) of devices is starting to look criminal in my eyes.
nicolas_t
What's a reliable company for multi-AP setups that also respect my privacy? Ubiquity had that whole phone home scandal.. Eero I'm not sure yet.
I have pfSense for the routing but now just need access points. So far I've been using an old Asus ac86u on Merlin as an AP but the reception is not great in other rooms due to the fact that walls in my apartment are concrete with rebar.
r1ch
If you can live with only 802.11ac, I've had great results flashing OpenWRT onto Mikrotik wAP AC boards. Performance peaks at about ~400mbps TCP throughput at 2x2 MCS-9. WPA3 works without problems. For multi-ap, setting up 802.11r is fairly straightforward, k/v requires some custom scripting to generate the neighbor reports. Be careful not to get the new revision with the two chain radio as the chipset is different and not yet supported by OpenWRT.
hackmiester
I just use the wAP ac (and cAP ac) as-is. I don't feel compelled to install OpenWrt.
r1ch
They're great devices even with the stock firmware, but their wireless drivers are quite dated (no wave2 support, no WPA3, no 802.11r/k/v). They do have a beta package with wave2 support but it's not supported on the low RAM devices like cAP / wAP AC.
LeoPanthera
I use a pfSense+UniFi combo. I know about the scandal, but they added an option for the user to control it and as far as I know, they haven't done anything questionable since - software quality aside.
(Actually I know the internet loves to bitch about Ubiquiti but my experience has been just fine. Maybe it's because I don't have a Unifi router.)
nicolas_t
Yeah, it might be an overreaction but the fact they did that does show that they have people who are clueless in their company and don't respect their customers
Given the target market of their product I would expect any such attempt to be quickly found so I guess there's not that much risk to use them
chenxiaolong
I'm looking for the same as well. I've heard good things about actual enterprise APs, though they seem to be quite expensive. Ruckus APs are 4x the price of my current Ubiquiti APs.
I'll probably do more research into this when Wi-Fi 6E becomes more commonplace. For now, I just block outbound internet access on the management network for my Ubiquiti APs and controller.
dddw
Mikrotik. Maybe?
asdff
I've seen a few articles that use a raspberry pi in fact
dialamac
CommScope Ruckus?
spiritplumber
We've open sourced every physical product we sell (lasers, the very first Android-based mobile robot, science instruments) and what it's gotten us so far is a Russian copycat that we can't get rid of.
Anyway, our stuff is at http://robots-everywhere.com/ and http://f3.to/cellsol/
wejick
Does the Russian copycat impose a (significant) problem in your business financially, and if there's other than financial issue?
spiritplumber
He betrayed my trust, but I have no legal recourse since he's never coming back to the US and suing a Russian citizen in Russia isn't likely to do me much good. I'm also nonviolent, so extralegal recourses are limited.
birdman3131
One thing this article completely misses is the reliability of the WRT54G. It may be old but I have never picked up a used one that did not just work reliably. Never heard of anybody I know having one die.
Contrast that to the newer square black pancake linksys routers and after about a year or so they seem to develop hardware issues and even a reset won't fix them. (Always assumed the chips needed heatsinks and were slowly cooking themselves)
Bluecobra
I remember lots of people reporting failures around the time when bad capacitors flooded the market and lots of consumer devices were affected. My WRT54G is a later model (v4.0?) that seemed to be unaffected by this issue.
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It's one of the most successful routers ever sold and yet network equipment manufacturers are still fighting tooth and nail to keep their devices closed source. It just doesn't make sense to me.