Slashdot Mirror
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).
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.
lpress the submitter, is literally linking to his own blog as an article for us to read.
DD-WRT works, it just isn't very clean under the hood.
- The entire interface is a mess of PHP spaghetti code with intertwined HTML
- Old code with poorly implemented features bolted on
- outdated UI that is honestly a little confusing to navigate
- poorly documented, and outdated documentation
I will say the user community is huge and that is one major benefit.
OpenWrt is more like a Linux based router OS, but is well organized internally, incredibly stable, and very flexible. By default it typically does not have a UI. There are a few different ones to choose from.
The original Tomato is actually a partially closed system. I should have been clear that I meant Tomato based firmwares such as the Toastman mod, Tomato Shibby, etc. which are based on TomatoUSB, an early fork of Tomato before it went commercial.
Why not just add a gb or two for cache on the router? That'll speed up streaming for us, and google could store advertisements on it that would otherwise take more bandwidth.
nope, more buffering slows things down
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bufferbloat
"When a router device is configured to use excessively large buffers, even very high-speed networks can become practically unusable for many interactive applications like voice calls, chat, and even web surfing."
In my opinion, OpenWRT is better than DD-WRT because OpenWRT is under pretty active development and has features that matter for making a better Internet.
DD-WRT is very difficult to compile, so in practice when a device comes out, you have one guy making a firmware stuffed with like 4 hotspots and 4 VPNs and 2 VoIP switches and DynDNS, or as many of those things as he can fit, and there’s no space for your own programs on the router. IPv6 is not a top priority at DD-WRT. And then nobody makes a new firmware for that device ever again, no matter how many security holes appear over the years.
In contrast, the latest OpenWRT comes with FQ-CoDel, IPv6, and DNSSEC. The default web-based administration these days is not bad, and the package system allows you to add interesting stuff, if your device has enough space. The Kconfig build system and the plain text configuration files make customization pretty easy.
The main downside is that OpenWRT is more picky about hardware. For DD-WRT, you have an ancient WRT54G, that’s fine, just install an equally ancient firmware. Ignore the problems; everybody else ignores the problems. Current releases of OpenWRT insist on a device that can run a modern kernel, with at least 4MB of flash and 32MB of RAM.
Have a nice time.