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Ask Slashdot: Is There Space For Open Hardware In Networking?
New submitter beda writes: Open hardware has got much attention with the advent of Raspberry Pi, Arduino and their respective clones. But most of the devices are focused either on tinkerers (Arduino) or most notably multimedia (Raspberry Pi). However, there is not much happening in other areas such as home routers where openness might help improve security and drive progress. Our company (non-profit) is trying to change this with Turris Omnia but we still wander if there is in fact demand for such devices. Is the market large enough and the area cool enough? Are there enough people who would value open hardware running open software even with a higher price tag? Any feedback would be most valued.
And by no, I mean yes. Is there space, sure, maybe consumer grade. Is it useful (beyond consumer grade? Probably not.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Particularly with the FCC racing to lock down router firmware, the market needs a player who will do the minimum the law requires, but provide as much freedom to tinker as possible.
Raspberry Pi is not an open, depends on closed source blobs in firmware and drivers. Stop spreading the lie
Good engineering is all about cost effective solutions, not whiz bang technologies.
Translation:
Just because it's "cool" (read that as PC, opensource etc) doesn't make it good engineering. If it's bad engineering (not cost effective), there is no place for it. period. If your price is higher because you think it's cool, go work for apple.
As long as it comes with service level agreements and support contracts and other such enterprise-related things.
Or as long as it's the cheapest thing you can get at your local big box retailer.
>but we still wander
Maybe you need a road map?
--
BMO
I saw the presentation at the OpenWrt Summit, and I got excited. I can't buy 10,000 units, but I'll probably start installing these by default wherever I can, assuming I can my hands on some at a price that works. I know I will run one at my house. =)
Copyediting. It's a lost art.
From my point of view, upgrades on most home networks are gated by the ISPs. In my case, I do need a fibre to ethernet transducer that only talks to the company sanctioned WiFi router, that also has IP telephony embedded. I can add extra devices, but I cannot replace those two. It would be great to have a single device that does all of that, and that requires a single electrical plug and occupies a small volume at home. A modular approach would be great too, in that depending on how you get your internet at home, you get a different PHY module. But I know that what I am asking for costs a lot of money.
And you do need to think about the antennas a lot. I can see how an Apple or Google branded router gets the "wife's approval", where latest Linksys monster does not. Visuals are also important, and a development board is not.
So, no I do not see many things gained by having a PCB sitting on the loose on the table with antennas sticking everywhere and with flaky firmware that might or might not be supported in a years time.
Copyediting. It's a lost art.
That implies prior possession of said art.
You must be new here.
I was speaking about the world at large, really. I know Slashdot's never had copyediting.
I think there is a discrepancy between your intended audience, home users, and the skills necessary to take full advantage of this platform. I could use it, but then I could build one of my own as well. General consumers want something that serves a well understood purpose and which requires little interaction. I think if you tailored it to a specific purpose, say as a security device which filters Internet traffic which was also you main WiFi access point it would sell. Being simply an open platform means you are marketing to hobbyists and quite frankly your platform has no real differences from others.
One of the larger selling points of open hardware and software is the cost benefit. Almost every example of open vs closed system has the open system costing less initially. Now, hiring a team of dweebs to go to fix your father in law's wifi would be nice, but I would not expect the extra cost to cover that. Does it?
Open hardware and software is great and could be very useful and successful in the router space, but you end off by teasing high prices though you were using Raspberry Pi and Arduino for comparisons. Those products are designed to be straightforward and cost not much more than necessary so as to spread adoption. If you plan on charging extra for the open aspect of what you plan to make (or if the cost is due to making hardware to compete with the high end router market; completely unclear which it is without clicking through), then you need to find something else to compare your product with. You say it is the router equivalent of Raspberry Pi and Arduino, people will think affordable, then laugh at you and walk away when they find out otherwise.
But yes, a good, affordable networking solution that brings security through openness is always welcome; just approach it right (or maybe do something different than what we've settled with from router manufacturers, if you don't go the dirt cheap hardware route).
Our company provides networking services and we generally use Cisco gear, but we've been dipping our toes into some lower-end markets that can't afford $1,500 Internet routers. In order to consider something likes this, the main thing we would be interested in is build quality. It seems that most SOHO routers are designed right at the edge of their thermal safety envelopes, which leads to crashes and failures. Even if we don't want to spend $1,500 on a router we would still want something that is robust enough to be shoved into a poorly-ventilated cabinet and run happily on its own for five years, except for the occasional software upgrade. I'd happily pay $100 or even $200 for that level of stability.
Help save the critically endangered Blue Iguana
My main gripes with things like this are:
1. Poor price/performance: I'm using a used atom board that I got for $65 with 4GB RAM included. It's hard to beat stuff like that in cost-efficiency.
2. Proprietary cases and accessories: For the love of god, just make your board compatible with mini-ITX mounting holes so I can throw it in a plain old PC case if need be.
3. Not enough support for niche accessories: can it fit a huge Compex wifi card? All that would require in most situations is having one of the mPCIe slots use a high-profile connector.
4. Debugging/recovery/etc: I hope one of those headers on the board is for a serial port or it's going to suffer the classic "bad network config locked me out, time to reset and start over" unless you're booting off of mSATA (more expensive) or USB (which is going to be sticking out of the device rather than internal).
I'll probably buy one anyway but I don't know if it would replace my main router.
With many modern OS's adding spying and telemetry features and then disabling all the tried and tested methods to bypass them it may wind up that the router is the only way to retain our digital privacy. So yes, I think open source networking has great utility.
.... if there's anything I'd want is basically a IP map tracker to any computer that hits my IP, and them mapped out on something like google maps in a visual way. Make figuring out where people are pinging your data are coming from. Given the NSA and law enforcement raping open computers silly it'd be nice if there was some easy way to see who is accessing your computer on the net.
See revolver maps as an example:
https://www.revolvermaps.com/
Can it run OpenBSD ARM? If not, forget it. The world doesn't need another AIDs-infested bullshit "router".
Banana Pi Router Board BPI-R1 ($90/€70). And of course the OpenWRT project has given us easy access to many home routers at the firmware level, so you can run all open software on a home router with Wifi and VLAN capable switch that can be bought from $20 up. Their wiki has a list of supported devices.
How long are they going to keep charging such ridiculous prices for 10 gig networking?
10 gig copper has been out now longer than it took 1 gig copper to go from being "ooh, enterprise" expensive to being in every $499 laptop you could find. Yet they've managed to prop up 10 gig switch and NIC prices forever.
Are 10 gig parts that complicated that they're staying so expensive for so long?
Or are we waiting for the next big "ooh, enterprise" speed bump to come along?
so I could run PFSsense rather than OpenWRT and I'd seriously take a look.
Not saying that OpenWRT is bad.. but it's more for WiFi access points than as a general purpose router.
Your price point for a fairly bare-bones dedicated PFSense SoHo Router - $100 USD and should be able to support around 100MB traffic load. Much more than that and I could get a pretty inexpensive Windows tablet and re-purpose that. Price goes up for support for higher bandwidth, multiple WAN connections, WiFi radio, etc.
I agree w/ the MicroITX case holes..
I can make my own router out of existing open hardware like the RPi, but it's not cost effective to do so when I can buy a commodity home router for under $100USD (or $200 for a nice one) and have it last several years. It's a nice idea on paper, but it's just not practical given what the average consumer can get off the shelf today without the hassle of trying to build and configure the damn thing themselves. The parts alone are going to cost more than OTS routers today, and then you have to figure in the cost of your time. Pointless. Nice for people who tinker and want to play, but lousy for the average joe/josephine. I also don't get what's open hardware about Turris Omnia, as it uses all the same brand name components OTS routers use that are compatible with OpenWRT and DDWRT? Will check out how much they want for the thing when they start their crowdfunding campaign, but my guess is this will die on the vine.
But don't expect people to support a badly engineered design.
I'd be likely to get one. Maybe to use as a router, but I'd think of it more as a general purpose small network appliance to be cast into whichever role I need. Right now, I use a consumer router with *wrt as my VPN endpoint for the rescue network on my sever rack. It provides access to IPMI and the IP-controlled power strip through a VPN. (Meaning it's not used often, and doesn't need to be fast). Your device looks good for that type of purpose. Rack ears, preferably 0-U rack mounting, would be handy.
I could see using it as a firewall or a light-duty file server.
I don't see a lot of mass-market potential; I don't expect to find it at Best Buy. Rather I see two or three markets. The OpenWRT community of course - I assume you have a consistent presence on those forums. If you get to be known as a "best choice" on the appropriate forums, I see some sales there. Certainly the same -type- of hobbyists who play with Arduino and RPi might also be interested, though I think you want to clearly distinguish yours as being a -network- device.
What could be gold would be if you had a version with excellent build quality and established a reputation with one of the communities where people build more serious networks and have need of a flexible appliance they can drop in to do a specific job. That may not be your target market, though. That would be one market at a time. Think of a use and target that community, think of another use and target that next community, etc.
Whatever happened to that startup that was making a tor router.. surely there is a market?
I manage the entire networking line, video cards, motherboards, ram, processors and a variety of odds and ends for a major Canadian retailer and have been doing so for almost 5 years. We tender over 150mil a year and i spend about 40-50 of that myself. I can tell you that i see a lot of potential in your product. I recent brought in the raspberry pi and have been selling them by the hundreds for months now with amazing success and margin... We had to bring in a accessories too.
My concerns and thoughts on your product are: .1% of the market but increasing your costs overall for 100% of your customers. Maybe have optional non SFP? Also pro tip for anyone buying networking hardware buy Axiom for SFP. its the same as cisco/hp etc even the same assembly line at 1/3 the cost.
1. Why is 1 LAN port right next to a WAN port and not with the other 4 LAN ports? You will only serve to confuse people that way.
2. The SFP adapter tho nice, i don't think is needed at all. We hardly sell any SFP/SFP+ in the consumer space. It is nice for the guys trying to get fiber on the lan however. Main point your hitting about
3. WIFI should not be optional. again 99% or more of the people buy wireless routers, all consumers have cel phones these days. It is what it is.
4. I absolutely LOVE the fact that you put a sim card slot on this. I get many customers looking for SIM routers for going outside the country and the choices are quite small. Netgear will not even sell me their SIM card router they gave basically a monopoly to these airport shops and will not allow it to retail.
I would comfortably stock 100 of these initially. Im sure they would retail
What about the facebook stuff they've been posting about? 6 Pack
There is closed hardware in networking. Any monkey can do that. They are glorified old PC's and all their value is in the software anyway. Hell there is no such thing as a "hardware networking appliance". Those only exist in the imagination of people that think learning to configure an IP stack is a somehow complex ordeal.
NO SIG
There isn't that much that would interest me for networking (I use a Linux pc now so I already have all the features I want).
But a device with the hardware to be a home automation server would be cool:
- low power so it can run in battery when the power is out.
- zwave/zigbee/thread radio
- gpio pins for connecting sensors and controllers
When you sign up with an ISP, they ship you a router that is usually a piece of cheap tat in hardware terms, has incompetently or maliciously built software, usually lacks useful features such as QoS, usually has some or all features missing or locked down (my ISP has just shipped me a VDSL router that has no telnet or SSH interface and where I can't change their utterly crappy DNS servers)
So yes, please, build some open source hardware that will run tomato and/or OpenWRT (absolutely not DDWRT). I would like to be able to support a computer club in my village hall with 30+ participants over wifi - not possible with any ISP-supplied or consumer router sold here. - they choke at 10 users.
I notice that most routers in the shops here cost around $60-80 USD. I would happily pay up to twice that for a really competent router. (a business grade router would be complete overkill and cost double again).
"Cock Up Your Beaver" does not mean what you think. This sig is intended to clog filters and annoy do-gooders
you dont give two shits about our oppinion, you just wanted to throw some buzzwords out there and a link to your product
go fuck yourself
If you want any consumers outside of tinkerers to care about open hardware, you need to explain to them what value they can get from open hardware compared to closed hardware, especially if there is a cheaper closed source option that I can reflash with open source firmware. Are there enough people out there that will both know the value and seek it out if it simply says "open hardware" somewhere in the specs without any further explanation? Maybe. You need to start with the "Why" not with the "How". The "Why" is "You can do x, y and z with our router [better|cheaper|at all|whatever], compared to other routers." The "How" is "via open hardware."
I know this may come off as "bullshit marketing speak" to some, but for me, I honestly don't know what open hardware would do for me. If your product is basically a router running DD-WRT/OpenWRT/Tomato, it better cost me no more than if I bought a Netgear and flashed it myself. If it costs more, what else am I getting other than convenience? I can't speak for everyone, but I have a feeling that those that already know that value of open hardware are also those that are very comfortable reflashing their own.
"It's not whether you win or lose, it's how drunk you get." -- H. J. Simpson
Recently, I picked up some used rack mount routers that are x86 based. Got them on eBay, plus upgraded the RAM to 2GiB, replaced CPU with one twice the clock speed and more cache, plus added larger storage. Installed pfSense on these things. Each one with upgrades was still under $100 thanks to people unloading seemly "useless" equipment on eBay!
These things are acting as more than just routers, too. Since it is FreeBSD based, there are tons of packages available. I've got nginx running on them as forward facing web servers to connect to the internal network's fastcgi services (PHP/HHVM). These boxes are doing this job beautifully right now.
It's got an marvell armada 385 in it. This is not "open source" unless you also think that proprietary dependencies are acceptable in an "open source" project. There are proprietary bits needed and those who are working on hardware that actually is freedom respecting and open aren't touching this. It's not enough just have OpenWRT support. OpenWRT isn't "open" itself. The boards it supports depends on lots of proprietary bits for just about *every* board out there on the market. There are depressingly few boards and devices which can be properly supported or fully supported by "open source" software.
Check out www.librecmc.org if you want a better idea of just how few devices can really be properly supported with only "open source" software. The list is dishearteningly small. There are some other devices which can be added to this list, but it remains a very small list, and this isn't a board that'll ever be supported.
There are individuals and a few companies working on various true open source projects, but this clearly isn't one of them. I know- this is my business and we're working with a few companies to free what they designed which is by accident freedom-respecting hardware should we add support for it in a freedom respecting distribution. Right now there are some more powerful boards that could be supported- but it's more like a board with 10/100 Ethernet ports with 16MB of flash and 128MB of ram. We might also be able to do dual-band wifi on some boards. The gigabit switches might be a problem and all 802.11ac chips are currently a problem.
its become fashionable to be an asshole on the internet. We used to keep computers out of the hands of the mentally ill too but not now. Now we give them reality shows and large paychecks.
Come on... He was posting from a 3 inch phone! I blame autocorrect! (And the fact that people try to do actual "work" from a 3 inch phone)
There was a recent crowdfunding campaign for a open-protocol switch (I forget if it was OpenNFV, OpenFlow, or OpenVSwitch? Probably NFV.)
4-port 100 Mbps, so easy enough to do cheaply these days. I didn't really have any experiments I wanted to do with one that I couldn't also do with a virtual switch, so I didn't join the crowdfunding, and for production work I'd want at least GigE, but it was still interesting thing to go by.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Most people aren't computer savvy and don't really care what router they have, as long as Netflix works fine. As such, I don't see many of them buying your device over a linksys or apple or whatever (unless you were to compete on price).
As for corporate, they are going to want someone to blame if it fails and they are already reasonably well serviced by Cisco and company (from what I can tell). You might have some more success here as there's more room to differentiate your product in meaningful ways, but I don't see open hardware being a major selling feature for companies who exist to make money and probably don't care much about open source.
That's just my 2 cents, I could be wrong. Computer savvy consumers might be interested (like me) but we aren't that big of a market and it would still have to have some cool features for me to buy it
There is definitely room for open source routers. Buffalo has been in that market for a few years and as a result sell some of the most stable of routers I've seen outside the enterprise market.
If you're going to build this, make sure all is accessible including the radios, each port individually and if you're going into the enterprise market, extensions to OpenWRT for centralized management would be awesome. I'd also like to see a router with more than just 4 ports.
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It does. I just build a couple of days ago a wifi-client router with a Pi and directional external antenna that has been able to get signal where nothing comercial that I've tried could. Tomorrow when the other external but this time omni gets here it will be the AP for the house.
Don't miss:
a. Open firmware on the boot and on the wifi cards. Make it easy for users to install those firmwares to the router overwriting whatever existed with something deterministic compiled.
b. Have it modular. In my case I need a Pi2 with an omni and a directional plus one ethernet. But I'd like some for my company and that migh be smaller but able to work well with more APs for coverage and roaming.
c. Don't make it do other stuff. No domotics, no media server, no NAS. There is lot of room for improvement with WIFI specially in using mesh and also with multipath.
The poster above made a point of mocking poor people so spoiled rich idiot is probably more likely.
What we have now in the marketplace is lots of routers with VLAN capable switches, which can all be running OpenWRT. For me it is not really important if the hardware is Open Source or not. I get a stable platform, and I can add USB and serial devices to it. And I can run whatever software on it that I want.
There are some complaints about the hardware accelerated switching whatever does not work well, but since since I am only on 60/60 mbps this is not big issue. I have a bigger problem with the built-in ssh performance not being fast enough.
ruling, accepted the arguments of the ACLU and let nearly all the insane people out of the asylums, and made it very hard to involuntarily commit people.
You appear, along with the dude photographed pissing in middle of a busy street in NYC, to be a flagship example of a benificiary of that ruling.
Hypocrisy - people LOVE the RPi (it's so VERY "open source"...) and yet some of the same actors despise the idea of a proprietary NVIDIA driver on Linux (to the point of actually adding code to Linux to make it harder to install and use... because binary blobs are EVIL, of course...)
Home router is necessary to connect you to the Internet but it is idle most of the time, just eating electricity. Why not use it for more tasks?
Why not reduce energy usage to the absolute minimum?
or is the company claiming that it can do all of those things and keep using the same amount of energy.
Give me a router that uses a 1-5 watts as opposed to 10-20 watts and I would be willing to pay extra money for it.
I am curious about everything related to the optional 802.11ac interface:
- chipset
- driver
- license of driver
- firmware
- performance
Other than this: very much yes.
I'll happily pay USD 100 for an open router platform. And pay extra for the wifi if.
Someone make a pure AP image with support for 802.11r/k and a hardware option for PoE, and you may have another winner.
Dag B
I'm an entrepreneur working on trying to build this out of a Raspberry Pi. Essentially, I want a router that creates a private WIFI network w/o needing a server.
IMHO your price point is a bit high. If there was a price in the middle between $35 and $100, I would switch to building on your platform today.
The max price for my product would be around $50-80, so the Pi fits well. I'd need at most 1 LAN port, and 1 WAN port. The core things I'd want are integrated WIFI, and software support for an easy linux setup.
I'm on your email list :-) Good luck!
It is possible to write a chess game simulation in those many words.
hilarious
There is a Norwegian startup - Domos Labs - that has had quite a lot of success with a combination of a fairly advanced router and OpenWRT. Their way into each country's market is quite original; they gain a foothold by giving away 100 routers to techies that are having trouble with their Wifi. The rest is achieved by word-of-mouth.
See also:
https://www.olimex.com/Products/OLinuXino/open-source-hardware
I would start with a A20-OLinuXIno-LIME2.
During last years I built a network of hundreds of OpenWRT-flashed routers. My custom ROM, based on OpenWRT, does dual wan, bgp and some other custom things. Unfortunately, manufacturers stop producing good routers after a while (like Asus phased out RT-N16) and I have to port my changes again and again to new and buggy platforms. Stable open router platform would be a gread thing, because all raspberries and co tend to have only one or two ethernet ports.
...when there's an open source car.
I can't count the number of times I've had to rest a commercial router because it mysteriously lost internet connection. I've tried different models and manufacturers but my general impression is that the HW is fine but generally the router SW is pretty buggy...
I expect OS router software would be better as- I'm sure the OS community would take the effort to fix this kind of annoyance!
A quick google search turned up an article talking about 6 OS router SW projects:
DD-WRT, Tomato, OpenWRT, M0n0wall, PfSense, and Vyatta.
I haven't tried one myself because I haven't wanted to mess with hardware compatibility issues, I guess I could buy a router others have used successfully but
an OS HW router seems like it would be a very natural fit for OS router SW- especially since the open platform would be documented so no one has to reverse engineer how the router works.