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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).
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.
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- outdated UI that is honestly a little confusing to navigate
- poorly documented, and outdated documentation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.