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Why Google Wants To Sell You a Wi-Fi Router
lpress writes: Last quarter, Google made $16 billion on advertising and $1.7 billion on "other sales." I don't know how "other sales" breaks down, but a chunk of that is hardware devices like the Pixel Chromebook, Chromecast, Next thermostat, Nexus phone and, now, WiFi routers. Does the world need another $200 home router? Why would Google bother? I can think of a couple of strategic reasons — they hope it will become a home-automation hub (competing with the Amazon Echo) and it will enable them to dynamically configure and upgrade your home or small office network for improved performance (hence more ads).
Not proven. Yay speculation!
As piss poor as home wifi is I say let Google give it a shot. They are talking about making it have QoS that doesn't suck so I'm interested.
I repeat. No Way In Hell. Even If I have Google Fiber. I will run my own router like I always have no matter what. Or I will just deal with another ISP.
Comparing various Starbucks locations (suburban and next to college campuses) where AT&T wifi networks were replaced with Google wifi, I would not buy a Google wifi router at present. In each case, the Google service is worse than its predecessor. This surprises me, but all I have to do is listen to the complaints of the students around me to know that I am not alone in this feeling.
Not only does it spy on your every move, you pay $200 for the privilege and unlimited advertisement injection for all!
They want to control your network. They want to inject advertising into everything you do. They want you to have no choice but to use DNS servers they control.
This isn't some benevolent endeavor, its purpose is to make money by selling you again.
Hell, google already knows enough about me through my phone, web browser etc. Should we just sign our information over to them upon birth and get it over with?
When I bought a Libre router I was doing it more for privacy and because I care about free software. What I didn't realize was I was going to get the benefits of being able to get latest bells and whistles not found in other routers because of the proprietary bits. The router I bought was from ThinkPenguin.com and runs a distribution called Librecmc. That distribution only runs on a small # of routers because there aren't any proprietary bits supported. The result of that though is I get the latest kernel and software stack possible. Every few months there is a new release and one of the recent releases had the very latest kernel. Compared to other routers I own that would *never* happen. Even with other third party firmware I've noticed similar issues. But because of this I've got unbelievably low latency now. I might consider a upgrade if/when they start selling a higher end router, but I wouldn't switch back to a $200 router if I can't run LibreCMC. It's just not worth it.
I think the comparison to Echo is obvious based on the design alone. That was my first thought when I saw a picture. But when I read the specs, it looks more related to the Nest products than Echo.
That said, I do hope they move to compete with Echo. I really like the idea of it, but Amazon tends to keep things too closely tied to their services for my taste. I would prefer to have something a bit more open (play local media, for example).
I don't buy a router unless I can put openwrt on it. Too many router companies have been caught putting deliberate backdoors on their routers. Free software is the only way to prevent this.
....they want to be able to mine your data at the lowest possible level, have a handy backdoor available in case the NSA comes calling, and so they can insert their own ads on every page of every website you ever browse.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
That's more likely what they're doing. Seeing how far they can expand the Fi network.
Just a logical push upstream by Google. All of your traffic increases your value to them vs. just plain search results. Give it away for free, and then we might be talking. Maybe.
If you buy one of these routers, you are a sucker.
Control the living room.
Why do you think Microsoft spent billions of dollars to develop its gaming platform? Control of the living room and of the house is a huge deal. Google has made major inroads in the area by its purchase of NEST and this is an extension of that. In thirty years they want to be the company running every home's electronics.
they want to spy on us. This is why they are doing this to us.
Nest thermostats often fail to get thru software updates without manual intervention. It's always written off as: your router isn't up-to-date/up-to-spec, and it needs fixing, not the thermostat that just quit working when we loaded new software, and your router and computer have been working fine for months, and in fact are still working fine. Nope, it's your router that's broken.
Of course, that's bullshit, but being bullshit doesn't make the thermostat work. You go to their website and there are lists of routers that don't work with their stuff. No official list of what does actually work is available, however. All anecdotal.
I will buy one just to put the thermostats on, and nothing else. Then if it doesn't work, there's only one support call to make, and hopefully no pissing match.
I know a couple of people who were involved in the development of OnHub and, FWIW, they say that the motivation was that there's a need for a Wifi router that performs better and is more secure. Not a strategic bet, just a perceived market opportunity which they thought Google was well-equipped to fill.
With regard to performance, the antenna design of the OnHub is supposed to be dramatically better than anything else on the market, and the device incorporates ideas from the Software Defined Networking stacks Google developed internally for its data centers, to optimize data flow. I wouldn't have thought there was much you could do to make Wifi work better, since the ISP connection is generally the bottleneck, but apparently there is. With respect to security, it adopts a number of ideas from ChromeOS, plus fully-automated updates. Probably the biggest security benefit compared to the competition is that security is actually a primary design goal, which isn't the impression I get from makers of home routers.
We'll see if OnHub actually is enough better than the competition to justify its premium price. Based on what I know of the people working on it I expect that it will. I ordered one.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Unfortunately the trend for the past 10-years has been ever worse consumer router hardware, a lack of security updates, decreasing performance and increasing prices. Further, a number of manufacturers have been going down the 'cloud' rathole. The industry is as bad as the telcos & cable, I for one welcome our new Google overlords.
While I'd rather run a pfsense box, these may still turn out to be much better than standard routers and be the one to recommend to your friends & family.
You got it backwards, your Router will be sucking your data and sending it off to who-knows-where.
Oh wait, you were talking about the ads your router will be sucking down for you. I stand corrected.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I don't think this is what Google had in mind, but I hope this will become part of their plan:
The real problem with Comcast isn't the connections to the home or to Comcast's servers, it's the routers which move traffic to other networks. Not just their peering relationships, but the hardware they overload along the way.
These devices have a network test function. They provide Google with a whole bunch of edge devices in the consumer Internet space which openly say they're going to communicate with Google. I'm hoping that Google will use these to map out ISP network and use the information to A. spoof DNS results to avoid overloaded equipment, B. Tattle on problems to partners to adjust BGP (or whatever ISPs are using now for routing tables), C. Use the information to bludgeon the ISPs (OK, really that just means Comcast) in the press and in Congress to force change to facilitate faster, cheaper connections.
So they can push more ads.
Most people don't have a separate firewall applicance separating the internet vs their local network. The router is the point of separation and it has full access to the local network. Because it's part of my local network, I want control over it.
The ISP can do what they want with packets out in the internet side of things, but that's okay because I already consider the internet to be a potentially hostile environment.
At that price I'd want 802.11ac, ability to permanently undo updates, export settings and a highly configurable firewall. The big thing in wi-fi at the moment is Fon The idea is to build a nation-wide wi-fi network like mobile phones have. It isn't created by the internet backbone building radio towers but by putting a hotspot in every shop, home and office, similar to the femtocells.
I think it's pretty obvious why Google wants to monitor every bit of information they can get their hands on. The more information they can track, package and re-sell about your identity the better.
Google can tout the third radio on this sucker to be for interference mitigation all they want, but Meraki touts it as a "security radio" on their cloud AP's, which is simply a sniffer that can easily be used to catalog and track any device probing for a network or associated with a neighboring access point, along with legitimate uses in thwarting attacks such as evil twins, etc. Looks like Google wants in on this dragnet too, they'd be stupid not to ignore the trove of valuable data it can provide.
The more information they can track, package and re-sell about your identity the better.
the chinese are already in your router, but this doesn't seem to bother you
The more information they can track, package and re-sell about your identity the better.
the chinese are already in your router, but this doesn't seem to bother you
Irrelevant. They are in the Google one too. At least Google isn't in the Dlink or whatever Made In China one you have too.
The Chinese are a shot in the head. Google is a shot in the stomach. Or vice versa, as you prefer. All else being equal, I don't want to get shot in both the head and the stomach, especially if the stomach shot comes first.
It's a very simple business plan. Here, let me lay it out for you:
1. Sell millions of WiFi routers for $200 each.
2. PROFIT!
Note, there's no missing step here.
because only google routers would do that, nobody else would ever do such a thing
In Soviet Russia, Google Routers search YOU!
[This would be a lot funnier if it was Kasperksy instead of Google, but I digress...]
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Nearly every poster here is ascribing ulterior motives to google. That may well be true...but if the router is as reliable as the google search service is, won't it be a pretty sweet device to own?
That's the same Forbes that publishes a 15-year-old photo of a Free Dmitri Skylarov protest alongside an article an Bunnie Huang, is it?
Hackable as in can I install *BSD on it?
Perl Programmer for hire
... trying to sell me a tinfoil hat?
Is Google (or any other ISP, for that matter) an SSL CA (Certificate Authority)? If they were, they could MiTM-attack all your HTTPS connections...
They want to sell you a router because:
- the one you're using sucks
- you refuse to use a wire because of iFashion or a sullen hatred of things that remind you of your failure at engineering like, ironically, wires, which have less engineering behind them than radio but are more visible reminders of your humiliation at maths
- out of lazyness and a weak need for an orderly world, you blame the suckage of your wireless router on the web site's being slow
- or, thanks to a deep, expensive PR campaign against cable company fuckery, maybe you finally blame your ISP instead of the web site sometimes, but actually determining the truth by experiment is beyond you.
Therefore, your web of delusions makes you incapable of fixing this problem on your own. Until you fix it, your Internet will suck, and you will prefer offline competitors to Docs, Play Store, Youtube, etc., making it impossible for Google to compete.
Also, a massive FUD campaign from ISPs (unsuccessfully challenged by https://openwireless.org/ ) tricked people into replacing their open access points, the old 90s "linksys global network," with free ISP access points preconfigured with WEP. The goal was to lock down open wifi to sell more accounts, and it was massively successful. Actually making the access points perform well was a non-goal in the campaign that rolled out the current fleet of access points, so access point quality went down overall.
Google "omg ad tracking," yeah, ok, sure. But they have other interests and other patterns of behaviour, such as a pattern of fixing persistently-broken Internet infrastructure to make their products more competitive. Chrome fixed crappy javascript performance, ChromeOS fixes crappy endpoint security, a variety of web standards remove the need for Flash and its multiple crappyness, (certificate transparency, HSTS, new crypto algorithms, Bloom filter malware blacklists, U2F) fix a variety of attacks, then there are little things like mod_pagespeed, performance commits to Linux kernel, Fi and o3b, etc. Google has a pattern of investing to unfuck persistently fucked areas, and wifi routers are definitely one of those.
Ad: Would you like to buy a sweater?
User: No
Ad: How about now?
Home users have too much control over "their" networks.
Routers currently allow users to have block lists, firewalls, port forwarding, which helps users access illegal sites, block ads illegally, and even allow users to spy on what packets are being sent back to the ad networks.
We need a secure router help keep users secure. It should be centrally managed.
It should be secure enough to resist all hacking attempts, and send reports of such attempts to a centrally managed authority.
All packets going in and out should be encrypted.
Users should require special network cards that do end to end encryption, and these should be matched to the router, so users can't spy on the packets being sent.
only authorized applications should have network access. any applications requiring network access should require a signed key.
Of course, to appease the whiny Linux nerds an unencrypted side channel, running at say 250kpbs would be provided, that should be enough.
Stop trying to sell me crap, i have ebay for that i wait until its rigged glitchy and blowing stew at so many different places nobody no which way to do the stage and phrase for the woe-b-unto
I do believe you mean Nest. It would be wise to make sure you proof-read and correct errors like that if you really want people to believe you've done your homework before writing an article like that.
And about IoT devices, they want to be the IP gateway to devices in your home as OnHub includes 802.15.4 radio. This allows to connect battery powered devices.
Where are all of you buying yours?
Is it so hard to see that it was a cartel set up with a particular function in mind? Now they want to see your local traffic.