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FCC Giving Away Wi-fi Routers For Broadband Tests
An anonymous reader writes "The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) will be giving away 10,000 Wireless-N routers as part of their program to perform a number of broadband tests, for the benefit of a better connection in the future. They are striving to work on improving a number of issues including latency, packet loss, connection speeds and much more."
Do I win a free router?
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
My privacy is worth much more then a crappy router that will accidentally send all my browsing information.
Knowledge = Power
P= W/t
t=Money
Money = Work/Knowledge so the less you know the more you make
Making sure everyone has fast, reliable access available is great; but the FCC also has to worry about internet caps! Now that AT&T is cutting people off after a certain amount of bandwidth use, someone with the power to stop this monopolistic abuse needs to flex some muscle. What is the FCC doing about internet caps?
I'm just guessing, but perhaps it would be wise to first measure and document what the carriers do, as opposed to what they say?
Money has been pissed away to bring broadband to the US because at one time people saw the utility of it. Someone is now looking into why it never materialized but the checks were cached.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
They have extended their research efforts to the public, but there are some minor requirements which need to be met. For example, your connection must be consistent (suffer very few disconnections), users must be considered average Internet browsers and not heavy downloaders [...]
Old news. This is already ongoing. It's a pretty darn decent Netgear (almost $100 on Newegg).
It is a simple program. I plugged in the Netgear router in between my firewall and my cable modem and configured it as a bridge. It analyzes the traffic and sends the information to the FCC.
I love how some people here are whining about privacy. I think those people will whine about anything. What is the alternative? The data needs to be collected. Either you want the government to step in and regulate the telcos, or you don't. If you don't, then STFU and stop whining about the crappy service they are giving you. If you do, then realize you have to be part of the solution. Whining about it never fixed anything. At some point, someone has to collect some data.
If you don't want to participate in the program, don't. On the other hand, I'm happy to know that the FCC is getting some real data to show that when I fire up my VPN client from home to do some work, everything else on the network (NetFlix, et al) gets throttled back to next to nothing. I'm happy to be a guinea pig so that the FCC an see that the supposedly "faster" connection that I'm paying for is not really any faster than the basic package.
If you're doing something with your internet connection that the government cares about, they already know about you. Participating in some research is not going to suddenly put you on their radar. Your browsing history is a lot less interesting to most people than you think it is. The country is involved in two wars and the economy is crumbling around us. Do you really think the government cares if you want to wank off to www.fatmomfetish.com, or whatever other "super secret private" stuff you are doing with your internet connection? Running a Tor exit node? Seeding the latest movie rip? Ooooo, you crazy rebels you!
Simple: the router must use custom firmware that performs bandwidth tests during idle periods and reports the results. Can't do that with any old random router off the shelf.
The FCC is making much fuss and noise about "digital inclusion" and whatnot, but no one at any level is willing to talk about the fact that most of the country has two or less options in broadband. During the summer of love (2002, IIRC), the big telecoms took advantage of deregulation to divide up the broadband market by city, and it's been higher prices, lower caps and no new pipe in ten yearsever since. Verizon FiOS is dead. Wireless is consolidating. It's permanent monopoly time, and the FCC just keeps talking about broadband maps and Internet literacy training (?!) as the solution.
Here's a better answer: bring back common carrier rules for backbone service rates, and let the local ISPs (remember those?) come back to life. Pass network neutrality. Ban the ownership of both content services and pipes. Lay some city-owned dark fiber and let the private sector bid to operate it. It ain't rocket science, but it will require standing up to Comcast and AT&T.
I have one of these devices. It's plugged into a port on a managed switch and doesn't see any of my traffic; basically it has access to the Internet connection and that's it.
There's a site at http://reporting.samknows.com/ that I can log into and see graphs of the test results, which are:
All these stats are graphed daily.
I have U-Verse, and the instructions state that with U-Verse you just plug the device into a switch port and plug nothing else into it. They probably don't want the U-Verse video traffic running through it. I also disabled its wifi, since it wasn't necessary.
Putting moderation advice in your
Money has been pissed away to bring broadband to the US because at one time people saw the utility of it. Someone is now looking into why it never materialized but the checks were cached.
Well there is the problem. Had they cashed the checks, instead of caching them, we might actually have some good broadband throughout this country.
Once it is yours (after the test) just nuke the custom firmware and load your favorite WRT flavor. I mean, unless you are paranoid enough to think they have custom hardware in there just to spy, and if you are that paranoid, you probably already think they have it in commercially sold routers.
Someone had to do it.
God damnit. Thats what I get for actually working today.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
Since the actual agreement leaves open the door that participants might not get to keep the router, I'll bet that jailbreaking it with other firmware before the project is complete is one of the exceptions that would have SamKnows knocking on your door wanting it back....
They won't give a crap if you jailbreak it AFTER the program is over.
I have one of these already. It's a NETGEAR WNR3500L. I've not seen any impact on my connection quality. Quite the contrary, I've used its reporting functions twice already in trying to get my ISP to track down connection quality issues at their end.
It keeps a running log of your ping, throughput, packet loss, etc. which you can access freely through their website. I was able to use this to document periods of latency spikes and massive packet loss.
I guess if you think the FCC is taking a particularly convoluted route to spy on me, rather than just, tapping in at the ISP itself, you're free to do that. I'll just think you're probably more than a bit daft.
Ahem. The WNR3500L they're giving away is a linux-based (openwrt) high-end wireless router. It was $150 when new, now can be had for $80. Its successor the WNDR3700 retails for $185 and it's freaking awesome. A customizable linux-based router is precisely what I'd choose if I wanted to do an experiment like this.
1^2=1; (-1)^2=1; 1^2=(-1)^2; 1=-1; 1=0.
Old news, and it was even posted on Slashdot when the program started last summer. I've been running an FCC White Box for several months now and love it. The router is a high quality Netgear with QoS filtering and all the bells and whistles you expect out of a $100+ router. It beats the ever living crap out of my old Belkin Wireless N. The tracking software doesn't monitor actual sites or any actual private information. Just packet loss, ping times, download and upload speeds, streaming stability, voip stability, etc. The graphs and charts it spits out are extremely useful and I've been using them for the past 2 months when complaining to Mediacom about my slow speeds, packet loss, and horrible ping times. It keeps 2 weeks of hourly data, and after that just tracks it as an average/min/max for the day. http://i53.tinypic.com/35bt5ro.jpg
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