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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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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
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
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.
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
Neither pfSense, nor any of the other m0n0wall derived router projects (SmallWall, t1n1wall, OPNsense) will work on Arm right now. As for cost, this will do gigabit speeds. http://www.mitxpc.com/proddeta...
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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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.
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
It is possible to write a chess game simulation in those many words.
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.
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.