Slashdot Mirror

While I concur about the general pricepoint, there are cheaper alternatives that are still perfectly good:
Ubiquiti: https://store.ubnt.com/unifi.html (all under $500)

It looks like their system was based on Topos MetroMesh in-band mesh backhaul, so someone using 1Mbps on one access point is tying up 1Mbps on multiple APs. This was at a time when 256 Kbps could have been considered "high speed". Not sure how many APs are connected to a fiber/copper/microwave backhaul, I guessing just a few to cut costs, but it would seem to me that as many APs as possible should have an out of band backhaul (ideally fiber to every AP)...Also APs antenna/RF might have to be tuned down to reduce coverage and a higher density of APs is likely needed with the increased usage - or multiple APs with sector antennas ( 3 x 120 degree, or 6 x 60 degree) are placed at locations instead of single AP with omnis - I'm thinking something LIKE the Ubiquiti NanoStations could be placed around a light pole to act as combination AP and 60 degree sector antenna and be more ascetically pleasing than the box with whips attached found right now, electronics to feed the NSs could fit inside most poles at the base, or in a small box near the AP/Antennas.

I have a 7.5 mile link. I have a 60ft tower I got for beer, yes beer but I had to take it down and set it up myself. My setup is a RB411AH http://routerboard.com/RB411AH with an XR2 802.11b/g 600 MW mini-PCI card and your standard 2.4GHz 24dBi parabolic grid type antenna and an enclosure for the routerbord. This is a little overkill but it works well. You can get some much cheaper all in one units now like http://www.ubnt.com/airmax#airgrid and probably be better off. I did have to work with the wisp for about 2 years to get all the bugs worked out.

Note: It wasn't me it was them but they worked with me and it's much better.... Granted my only other choice was Satellite but hell no I'm a gamer.

What city?

Work out a deal with the nearest datacenter for a point to point wifi ethernet bridge. Those can reach over 10 miles reliably. If T1 is $2619.20/mo you could buy a gigabit bridge and become an ISP. Wireless gigabit will go 5 miles, just look at this device.

Look at this instead at about 1/10th the cost http://www.ubnt.com/airfiber

All this is beyond the point, paying thousands for radios, towers, links and other crap shouldn't be necessary so you can play COD5 on your next x-box

http://www.ubnt.com/edgemax

Dont know about the hardware, but that Video on front page is AWESOMO

(reposted, because I forgot to login) No good consumer router on the market? Are you MAD? http://www.ubnt.com/edgemax
Over 1million PPS. Based on a forked Vyatta, running on a dual core MIPS64 Cavium Octeon with IPv4 (and soon IPv6) hardware offload, with a debian base. You can apt-get install from the MIPS repos all day. Check the Tolly Report here: http://dl.ubnt.com/Tolly212127UbiquitiEdgeRouterLitePricePerformance.pdf, where it beat a Cisco 3925 and Juniper J6350 into the ground. Total cost for these buggers? $99. Warning, they are on backorder with all the distributors until roughly middle of Feb. Oh, and you're welcome.

(reposted, because I forgot to login) No good consumer router on the market? Are you MAD? http://www.ubnt.com/edgemax
Over 1million PPS. Based on a forked Vyatta, running on a dual core MIPS64 Cavium Octeon with IPv4 (and soon IPv6) hardware offload, with a debian base. You can apt-get install from the MIPS repos all day. Check the Tolly Report here: http://dl.ubnt.com/Tolly212127UbiquitiEdgeRouterLitePricePerformance.pdf, where it beat a Cisco 3925 and Juniper J6350 into the ground. Total cost for these buggers? $99. Warning, they are on backorder with all the distributors until roughly middle of Feb. Oh, and you're welcome.

I am not able to install a controller based Wi-Fi solution in my office due to cost...

Yes, you are.

Check out UniFi by Ubiquity Networks - they're cheaper than you think (in the same ballpark as premium consumer wifi gear) and the controller is a software instance you can run on just about anything. Management is through a web browser and is dead easy.

The wifi networks have great throughput, the Pro access points have 3x3 MIMO, and they're stable and reliable.

You also get some other good features, such as traffic analysis and reporting, a captive portal for guests that can either use tickets (generated in the controller software) or via a PayPal gateway if you want to start charging people for access and plug-and-play for adding new APs to the network.

Disclaimer - I have deployed a number of Ubiquity networks for my clients, and they're all working successfully.

Why write off a proper wireless network right away?

http://www.ubnt.com/unifi I can put in a 4 AP managed system with a cheap PC as the controller for less than the cost of ONE stand alone Cisco AP.

Plus it's better quality that anything you can buy from Dlink, Cisco, etc...

If the only think keeping you from a controller based solution is cost try Ubiquiti's Unifi. You can run without a controller and if you need one you can use any old embedded box. http://www.ubnt.com/unifi

If you have the right ISP and are willing to pay the money, you could have 4x that today.

http://www.ubnt.com/airfiber

Find a high structure (a WISP in NW Minnesota here uses grain elevators in each town) you can attach to for a reasonable rent or trade out of service. Get a 3.65 Ghz license , place Ubiquiti Rockets attached to sector antennas (or an Omni if you're covering a really small area), and use Ubiquiti NanoStations for CPEs....If the structure is remote from the fiber termination use something like Air Fiber for the back haul to fiber termination - this could start as a 150Mbps 5.8 GHZ point-point link if you're on a budget, but you'll want to eventually get a back haul that won't get saturated during heavy use. Ideally you'll want build fiber to each POP though.

Find a high structure (a WISP in NW Minnesota here uses grain elevators in each town) you can attach to for a reasonable rent or trade out of service. Get a 3.65 Ghz license , place Ubiquiti Rockets attached to sector antennas (or an Omni if you're covering a really small area), and use Ubiquiti NanoStations for CPEs....If the structure is remote from the fiber termination use something like Air Fiber for the back haul to fiber termination - this could start as a 150Mbps 5.8 GHZ point-point link if you're on a budget, but you'll want to eventually get a back haul that won't get saturated during heavy use. Ideally you'll want build fiber to each POP though.

Find a high structure (a WISP in NW Minnesota here uses grain elevators in each town) you can attach to for a reasonable rent or trade out of service. Get a 3.65 Ghz license , place Ubiquiti Rockets attached to sector antennas (or an Omni if you're covering a really small area), and use Ubiquiti NanoStations for CPEs....If the structure is remote from the fiber termination use something like Air Fiber for the back haul to fiber termination - this could start as a 150Mbps 5.8 GHZ point-point link if you're on a budget, but you'll want to eventually get a back haul that won't get saturated during heavy use. Ideally you'll want build fiber to each POP though.

Find a high structure (a WISP in NW Minnesota here uses grain elevators in each town) you can attach to for a reasonable rent or trade out of service. Get a 3.65 Ghz license , place Ubiquiti Rockets attached to sector antennas (or an Omni if you're covering a really small area), and use Ubiquiti NanoStations for CPEs....If the structure is remote from the fiber termination use something like Air Fiber for the back haul to fiber termination - this could start as a 150Mbps 5.8 GHZ point-point link if you're on a budget, but you'll want to eventually get a back haul that won't get saturated during heavy use. Ideally you'll want build fiber to each POP though.

I'd go fixed-wireless. It's the only option that you can start on a shoestring and end up with a decent business. Tapping the fiber can get quite expensive. It probably goes through the local telephone Central Office, so your best bet is to find cheap office rental as close to the CO as possible, and then contact the middle-mile provider for a quote to run you a drop. Bonus if you can rent a space in a muti-story building and arrange roof rights for a few antennas.

But this is doable, if you are serious about it.
Ubiquiti wireless gear is the way to go right now, and there's lots of technical help on their forum and others. Their 900Mhz gear will handle SOME tree coverage, as will the 2.4Ghz. Their gear is so cheap that you can afford to make little house-to-house relays to get into hard to reach spots. Their wiki has a decent write-up of how to build a WISP with their gear.
http://wiki.ubnt.com/Building_a_wisp

There are lots of other gotchas in the biz, arranging tower sites (private landowners are good, but you'll need a solid contract), getting customers to actually pay you (at all, not just on time), each install is going to have to be paid for up front ($150-200) and you won't make any money off that customer for about 6-8 months, service truck & tools, insurance (wispinsurance.com) and lots more.

Go lurk on the Ubiquiti and Mikrotik forums for a few months, and you'll start getting a clear picture of what running a small ISP day-to-day is like.

You don't want to go through the trouble and expense of rolling out cable to people's houses - you don't have the budget to cover for it, and no one could afford the installation charge if you passed it all on to them. Look at Ubiquity wireless gear - it's very good, priced amazingly well, and is relatively easy to set up and configure. They do backhaul stuff, distribution stuff and even 802.11a/b/g/n that is comparable to Cisco at 1/4 the price.

Seriusly? 200 yards? That's one problem that I see with the US, share a connection with a neighbor of yours. I know, I know the EULA's and the bad neighborhood's. http://www.ubnt.com/airmax#nanobridgem And figure out some sort of load balance.

Screw em, be the ISP. This has a range of 31 miles and a throughput of 300Mbit/sec. Buy 2 kits and you can surely make it to a datacenter that has wholesale broadband. A real-world implementation of this equipment achieves 12/3 internet to the user.

You can do that with any number of wifi products, no amateur license needed - in fact, you'll almost certainly run afoul of the FCC quite quickly using amateur frequencies for general Internet traffic. The quickest thing to note is that you can't do anything relating to work for money using amateur frequencies.

Look at somebody like Ubiquiti Networks for some very good solutions that don't require an amateur license.

Note, though, that most ISPs won't take kindly to this, as it's very likely to break their terms of service for end-user connections.

Look at ubiquiti's stuff. M5 Wireless bridges out to to the AP's and UniFi [normal or long-range] for the clients.
www.ubnt.com
Nanostation M5 [5Ghz]: http://ubnt.com/nanostationm
UniFi: http://ubnt.com/unifi

Not as slick as Ruckus or some other stuff, but incredibly cheap. [Bridges are about $200 for a pair - and super solid, massive through-put. UniFi is about $70 per AP.]

You also get the ability to help pay for the system via UniFi. [Paypal subs, no admin reqd. Vouchers for "free" use etc.] That's all included for "free" in their system.
Plus you can use Pico's for outdoor use. Already weather-proof.

[I've not run the Pico's - so check it out in the forum: http://www.ubnt.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?f=48 - you should be able to get your answers there.]

It's really some of the best bang-for-the-buck for non super-high-density WiFi use around, IMO>

-Greg

Look at ubiquiti's stuff. M5 Wireless bridges out to to the AP's and UniFi [normal or long-range] for the clients.
www.ubnt.com
Nanostation M5 [5Ghz]: http://ubnt.com/nanostationm
UniFi: http://ubnt.com/unifi

Not as slick as Ruckus or some other stuff, but incredibly cheap. [Bridges are about $200 for a pair - and super solid, massive through-put. UniFi is about $70 per AP.]

You also get the ability to help pay for the system via UniFi. [Paypal subs, no admin reqd. Vouchers for "free" use etc.] That's all included for "free" in their system.
Plus you can use Pico's for outdoor use. Already weather-proof.

[I've not run the Pico's - so check it out in the forum: http://www.ubnt.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?f=48 - you should be able to get your answers there.]

It's really some of the best bang-for-the-buck for non super-high-density WiFi use around, IMO>

-Greg

Look at ubiquiti's stuff. M5 Wireless bridges out to to the AP's and UniFi [normal or long-range] for the clients.
www.ubnt.com
Nanostation M5 [5Ghz]: http://ubnt.com/nanostationm
UniFi: http://ubnt.com/unifi

Not as slick as Ruckus or some other stuff, but incredibly cheap. [Bridges are about $200 for a pair - and super solid, massive through-put. UniFi is about $70 per AP.]

You also get the ability to help pay for the system via UniFi. [Paypal subs, no admin reqd. Vouchers for "free" use etc.] That's all included for "free" in their system.
Plus you can use Pico's for outdoor use. Already weather-proof.

[I've not run the Pico's - so check it out in the forum: http://www.ubnt.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?f=48 - you should be able to get your answers there.]

It's really some of the best bang-for-the-buck for non super-high-density WiFi use around, IMO>

-Greg

Ubiquiti has some very cool products and customer support, you might want to look into their gear.

If you can get line of site from the remote sites back to the central site you should use 5Ghz for the backhaul, and 2.4Ghz for the client side radio. This will reduce your interference. Also, the backhaul should use _very_ directional antennas since the two endpoints are known. This will also prevent interference. It doesn't sound like any of your distances are enough to require a multi-wireless hop, although your sight lines may require it. Avoiding a double hop will increase performance.

You'll also want some intelligent QoS on both the WiFi and cable modem side. You don't want one user to be able to make the experience really bad for all the other users. For instance, if you had a 20Mbps cable modem you might want to limit any one IP/MAC to 5Mbps, or so. WRED or similar can also be your friend. Make sure there is a good local DNS server, as well

I don't think one vendor will supply everything that you need, but you definitely need to take a look at uBiquity. We've used their NanoBridges in studio-to-transmitter links several times and have been pleasantly surprised. The stuff is ridiculously cheap -- so cheap that we honestly wondered what could be wrong with it until we tried it. (Less than $160 for a pair of NanoBridges!)

Ubiquity's Website

If you don't mind going a little DIY, there is the Ubiquiti RouterStation Pro. It's a board with four GigE ports and three mini-PCI slots for wireless cards, and comes loaded with Open WRT. Look around online and you should be able to find a few places selling it with a simple case, power pack, and a wireless card for ~$150 or less. Note, I haven't used it, so I can't speak from experience. It's on my wishlist though :)

I haven't used it either, but I've used some other Ubiquiti products and have been very pleased with their hardware and software. Very stable and well developed.

If you don't mind going a little DIY, there is the Ubiquiti RouterStation Pro. It's a board with four GigE ports and three mini-PCI slots for wireless cards, and comes loaded with Open WRT. Look around online and you should be able to find a few places selling it with a simple case, power pack, and a wireless card for ~$150 or less. Note, I haven't used it, so I can't speak from experience. It's on my wishlist though :)

Ubiquity http://www.ubnt.com/ has a device called a nano station it is perfect for your needs it can share the connection using wireless over distances up to 5 miles. but the range can be limited in the device via power management. they run DD-wrt and can be configured as access point or point to point connections. I have used them for years as a network solutions provider.

Using the 'Spectrum Analyzer' features built in to most APs and wireless clients will only show you other WiFi traffic not noise (almost always true). Also, they are not very portable. The earlier post about asking you local Ham Radio club is a good idea if there is anyone available and many Hams don't have equipment to listen to 2.4 or 5 GHz. You can search on google and other places for a 'usb wifi spectrum analyzer' for less than $50 that plugs in to your laptop. Be careful and read the specs though as some required that you use them in DOS mode. This will let you look at the actual received power level across the whole spectrum. You can walk around with a laptop until you find the noise source. It is still a steep price to pay for a one time fix. If you are the crafty type you can get a ez430-RF2500 target board for $22 from Texas Instruments. You will need to search for a software load that make it a SA but the are many instructions online. If you don't want to roll your own and get a prebuilt solution you can use the Ubiquiti AirView2 for ~$40. This is a very nice tool. You could even split the cost with your neighbors or pool money or request the person with the noisy device foot the bill for finding it.

Get either the USB stick or one of the 2.4Ghz supported AP's from Ubiquiti. [www.ubnt.com]

The newest firmware supports a Spec analyzer mode - quite good, IMO - and it's not limited to WiFi equipment - anything in the radio spectrum is "seen."

Their wireless bridges in the 5Ghz spectrum using N tech (dual spacial streams) are seriously killer too - if you've got a wireless bridge, or WISP type situation, it's really, really cheap stuff. I'm likely to end up with 2.4 ghz and 5Ghz units just for spec analysis on the cheap. The units then double as AP's / routers / Bridges. (And at around $100 each, they're pretty awesome - Bullet M5, and Nano Station M5's for example.Find a wireless N bridge that will hold links over miles that are that cheap anywhere else!)

For around $100 you could have a nice AP and a spec unit in the same hardware. Antenna, unless built into the unit is a bit more difficult/pricey, but still do-able.

Anyway, I've got a setup using them in a PtMP setup, and though it's not miles, I'm seriously impressed - and the cost factor is simply *insanely* cheap.

http://www.ubnt.com/

-Greg

You cannot get better than about half of your nominal throughput, at least on .11a or .11g. Ubiquiti advertises 100mbps of real throughput on their non-mimo .11n radios, which connect nominally at 150mbps. And yeah, that's combined up and down.

The PC Engines ALIX series are similar to the Soekris boards, are fast and well supported by various open source routers, including hardware based crypto acceleration.
It comes in various versions with different number of lan ports and mini-pci ports to fit most needs.
http://www.pcengines.ch/alix.htm

Another good and cheaper replacement is the router station pro.
It does have gigE ports, unlike the ALIX and Soekris boards, and is quite affordable.
http://www.ubnt.com/rspro
Version with case here:
http://www.netgate.com/product_info.php?cPath=27_104&products_id=812

RouterStation Pro has everything:

-gigE
-mini pci slot for wifi cards
-enough ram for pretty much anything

(some assembly required :))

I do not work for them, and am not payed by them, just a happy user

Problem Solved.

Not to mention a company that will test your setup in their lab if you have a problem and live on OSS principles. Great people! It's also cheap reliable hardware. http://ubnt.com/

Ubiquiti has started making 802.11n 5GHz access points although the price may be a little high. They have some inexpensive 802.11a products though.

I'm running Tomato, and reviews seems to indicate that it should be slightly faster than DD-WRT in some cases, but the difference would not be major in any sense. There's a year and a half old review of the two firmwares with some figures here.

None of them get close to 100 Mpbs unfortunately. Overclocking would help, but I doubt it would be enough. There's some info on overclocking DD-WRT here.

As for the RouterStation Pro there's some info on the recently completed competition to develop a Open-WRT based admin interface for it, posted in slashdot a few weeks ago, some furher details here.

I really like the WRT-routers, they're stable and cheap, but a bit too slow.

I have a WRT54GL and a 100/10 conection as well, and I can also confirm that getting above 30-40 Mbps is difficult. With some tweaking seems to be possible to reach 50 perhaps, but then the CPU simply won't handle more traffic. Enabling QoS or other features will obviously decrease this value even more. At first I thought I might have misconfigured something, but after a lot of googling this really seems to be the capacity limit of these routers.

Looking for an alternative that's quiet, low power and linux friendly I came across the Routerstation Pro http://www.ubnt.com/products/rspro.php. It runs the same linux-based firmwares as the WRT line of routers, but with a CPU clocked more than 3 times as high, more RAM and expansion possibilities etc. I have not tested it yet though, but reviews seems promising, routing 100 Mpbs should not be a problem.

The contest was for firmware images that can specifically run on Ubiquiti's RouterStation and RouterStation Pro products. However, you'll be happy to know that I included instructions on how to build your own firmware for any given platform/device. It really isn't that hard but it does take a while to compile (can take a few hours even on fairly modern systems).

I recommend you just grab the latest OpenWRT trunk release via svn (instructions at dev.openwrt.org) and copy the PyCI-OpenWRT-trunk.config file from the PyCI source package to that directory and rename it ".config". Then run "./scripts/feeds install -a", "make oldconfig", "make menuconfig", and then change the configured platform to the platform of your choice. After that you can run "make V=99" to compile your firmware. It'll show up under the trunk/bin directory.

For reference, the very same instructions are also included in the source code package under the "docs/build/html" directory.

routerstation is a router board made by ubiquiti
http://www.ubnt.com/products/rs.php

Looks a fair bit more powerful than say, a wrt54G, so I'm doubting this will run on one..?

There are also cheap alternatives based on 680MHz MIPS CPU (all overclockable to 800MHz):

RouterStation Pro - 128MB RAM,16MB flash,4xGb ethernet,USB 2.0
Mikrotik RoutBoard RB450G - 256MB RAM,512MB Flash,microSD card slot,5x Gb ethernet (for hdd you can use some cheap Gb AoE box like Welland)
Mikrotik RoutBoard RB433AH - 128RAM,64MB Flash,microSD card slot,3x 10/100 ethernet, 3x microPCI

All can run OpenWRT or Debian.

None that I'm aware of. I was specifically responding to parent's problems with the WRT54GL.

If I needed 802.11n today I would go with Ubiquiti.

Trendnet TEW-652BRPv1.1 was $40 at Fry's this afternoon. I got a few firmwares to boot on it already, and OpenWRT has some support if you're willing to play wiht dd and a hex editor to make a valid install bundle. I do with Tomato worked on it, because Tomato has a great UI but I have plans for this thing other than routing so OpenWRT is perhaps a better choice for me. Mine only have 4MB flash and 32MB ram though. In all honesty I could live with half the RAM and double the Flash.

While I applaud vendors that embrace an open platform. I must say that $140 is a bit steep. Ubiquiti's products are open and well supported by third parties. And starts at around $60 for a basic 11b/g outdoor model and goes up to about $90 for several models that do 11n.

This metered approach is similar to how the wireless industry has operated.

Did he forget or does he not know that a wireless link (one broadcast sector) is similar to a hub where all the data goes to all the users, but only the one that asked for it uses it, so the bandwidth is shared. Where as a wire (cat3, cat5, fiber, etc) can transmit the full speed to a single user and they do not have to share bandwidth and cannot see each others data.

They have 10+Gb/s [full-duplex] fiber and Ethernet, but the fastest PtP wireless link I have yet to see can only do around 4Gb/s [full-duplex] (Dragonwave) and the fastest PtMP that I know of can only do 103Mb/s [half-duplex / MiMo] (Ubiquti)

Wifi does not cost the provider much to implement. $50-$100 per AP plus up to $100 for an omni antenna if one does not come with the AP. Ubiquti makes good Wifi products at decent prices.

Ubiquity makes hardware that you may find useful

see http://www.ubnt.com/

Just WISP it.

This isn't a theme competition, it's a user interface competition.

After reading the technical requirements, it's clear this isn't really a user interface competition. User interface is a part, yes, but I would say the much smaller part of the contest. Take a look at this part of the official "technical requirements" of the contest to see what you would have to implement, in addition to a UI. Actually, I would say the 200,000 they are putting up for the contest is an absolute steal... implementing all these features would typically take a team of quite a few engineers (or a few working much longer), and you'd probably end up paying them much more than 200,000 dollars combined regardless.

Technical Requirements:

REQUIRED FEATURES A. Network 1. Interfaces 2. Bridge 2.1 STP - Spanning Tree Protocol 2.2 Port management 3. Point-to-Point tunneling 3.1 IPSec (AH/ESP) 3.2 PPTP/PPPOE concentrator/server; including authentication (PAP, CHAP, MSCHAPv1 and MSCHAPv2), MPPE encryption, compression possibilities 3.3 L2TP (VPN) 4. VLANs - IEEE802.1q Virtual LANs 5. DNS - Domain Name System 5.1 Static 5.2 Proxy 5.3 Dynamic 6. DHCP - Dynamic Host Configuration 6.1 Client 6.2 Server - with static and dynamic leases 6.3 Relay 7. Routing tables 7.1 Static Source 7.2 Multi path routing 7.3 Selective/Policy Based Source 7.4 Dynamic routing 7.4.1 RIP 7.4.2 BGP 7.4.3 OSPF 8. Bonding - aggregating multiple network interfaces into a single logical one 9. SNMP agent - for read-only statistics 10. Traffic accounting (monitoring/graphing) B. Wireless 1. Ubiquiti SR/XR/SR71 radio support with card frequency detection 2. Virtual AP (MBSSID) 3. Modes 3.1 Station 3.2 AP 3.3 Repeater 3.4 WDS (utilizing WPA/WPA2) 4. Security 4.1 WEP 4.2 WPA/WPA2/IEEE802.11i 4.2.1 Personal (PSK) 4.2.2 Enterprise (EAP) 4.3 Layer2 Isolation 4.4 Access Control List 5. Basic 5.1 ESSID 5.2 Channels/Frequency 5.3 Output Power 5.4 Data Rate 5.5 Frequency List 5.6 Site Survey 6. Advanced 6.1 ACK Timeout Adjustment 6.2 RTS/CTS 6.3 Fragmentation 6.4 Super Features 6.5 802.11e (WMM) 6.6 Antenna Selection 6.7 Multicast Rate Selection C. Network Access 1. AAA (Authentication Authorization and Accounting) 1.1 HotSpot Gateway with RADIUS 1.2 HotSpot Captive portal, splash screen customization, walled garden 2. IP Firewall 2.1 TCP/UDP matches 2.2 ICMP matches 2.3 MAC matches 2.4 IPP2P 2.5 Layer7 2.6 Port Forwarding 2.7 DMZ 2.8 NAT - Network Address Translation 3. Bridging Firewall 3.1 802.3 matches 3.2 ARP matches 3.3 IP matches 3.4 Mark matches 3.5 Packet type matches 3.6 STP matches 3.7 VLAN matches 4. QOS/TOS - manageable per MAC/IP/subnets/ports and port ranges 4.1 Static Bandwidth Control 4.2 Dynamic client rate equalizing 4.3 p2p traffic management 4.4 Bursting D. Management Access 1. Telnet 2. SSH Server 3. Layer2 telnet 4. HTTP/HTTPS 4.1 Server 4.2 Proxy 5. System Users and their passwords E. System/Services 1. Manual clock control 2. NTP (Network Time) Client 3. Logging - both local and remote 4. User login access (admin/read-only) 5. Usage Statistics 6. Firmware Upgrade 7. Configuration file upload/download 8. USB Mass Storage Support / Flash Memory Auto-Backup F. Utilities 1. Ping 2. Trace Route 3. Memory Info 4. CPU load 5. Network Statistics 6. TCP Dump 7. Speed Test

anon says: The challange is about to implement a (new) gui for the Ubiquity Router Station, based on AirOS

If you read their forums, this has been explicitly debunked. They say OpenWrt. See:

http://forum.ubnt.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=6734

I think any wise developer would go with OpenWrt Trunk and update every month or so during development.

I have taken some of what you say and started to compile a list on the Ubiquiti contest forums.

http://ubnt.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=8884

Regarding some of what you say as an OpenWrt user: I personally think any new UI should be 2.6 only and only ath5k/ath9k (no madwifi). This is complex enough, supporting these out of date platforms when a new Trendnet router has ath9k and 400Mhz CPU for $25 to $45 is available. Kenrel 2.4 is on the way out, FINALLY, b43 has already been the push of Kamikaze 8.09 release.