- Saturday, 21 November 2009
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The thing with high tech is that you always end up using scissors - David Hockney
Netgear's open source router to hit the shops
NETGEAR has announced an open source router.
The WNR3500L is an open sauce 802.11n router that can be customised with various third-party firmware.
According to the outfit, the RangeMax Wireless-N Gigabit Router with USB is also designed to serve as a high-performance Linux platform.
It can support a wide variety of applications created by development partners and the open source community, Netgear claims.
Partners include BigFoot Networks which has been interested in boosting network speeds for online gaming. Leaf Networks has written firmware for better remote access and Paragon Software wrote firmware for high-speed USB file reads and writes. And Sputnik has apparently written code for hotspot locations.
The router runs the most popular free, open source Linux-based firmware including DD-WRT, OpenWRT and Tomato.
Customers can download the Linux-based open source firmware from the open source community and development program web site at myopenrouter.
On the hardware side it runs a 480MHz MIPS 74K chip and has 8MB of flash, 64MB RAM and a Broadcom BCM4718 radio.
It is designed to compete with Linksys's WRT54G and WRT54GL routers, both of which have long been prized for their third-party firmware support. Netgear claims its new router is a lot more powerful.
It should be in the shops by the end of the month and will set you back $140. µ
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With one of these properly configured at home people wont need to whinge about their broadband rates...
Oh hang on...
Another vector for malware attack. Where do I download an open source anti-virus for the router?
The good thing is you can change out the firmware if you want, but at $140 it's pretty expensive. I'd rather use an engenius EOC1650 for outdoor installs (only $50 and also supports openwrt/ddwrt) and a ubiquiti routerstation pro for indoor applications ($79 and has poe, 128mb ram, usb, and openwrt/ddwrt support).
If the $140 price is accurate I think it's a flop.
Tom, you got it! It would be great to have the world linked through a truly free network without control by the telcos. But, as expected, the first moron already smelled just a malware attack. Maybe we are not civilized, yet.
I want Dual band. 5.8 GHz 2.4 GHz, 600Mbs
@KoB: Try ClamAV, you can compile it, or assemble it as you see fit, it OSS so, pretty much you can do it the way you need it!
:)