[Make-wifi-fast] [bufferbloat-fcc-discuss] On building your own routers and the mass market

[Jay Maynard]

Well, I was going to look at the eero...after all, it seems nice from their
blurb...

but $499 for a 3-pack? Ow crap! Way outside the budget.

On Fri, Mar 11, 2016 at 2:09 PM, Dave Taht <dave.taht at gmail.com> wrote:

> Changing the topic. I'd like the arstechnica discussion to remain
> political....
>
> On Fri, Mar 11, 2016 at 11:31 AM, Paul Vixie <paul at redbarn.org> wrote:
> > Jonathan Morton wrote:
> >>> On 11 Mar, 2016, at 20:22, Luis E. Garcia<luis at bitamins.net>  wrote:
> >>> Time to start building our own.
> >> A big project in itself - but perhaps a worthwhile one. We wouldn’t
> >> be able to compete on price against the Taiwanese horde, but price is
> >> not the only market force on the table. Firmware quality is a bit
> >> abstract and nebulous to sell to ordinary consumers, but there is one
> >> thing that might just get their attention.
>
> I  totally approve of people getting together and building things they
> think the market needs, or merely what they think they need.
> Ironically, in 1999, the designs I was shopping around for a "home
> wireless AP" were designed to plug into where the thermostat was in a
> house, had a touchscreen (and ran x-windows remotely), and sank
> without a trace past a VC's glazed eyes over and over again.  Then the
> wrt happened. in 2002... and 15 years later, Nest happened... sigh.
>
> The segment of "makers", the essential R&D, ultimately feeds into more
> polished products, and people should try making those too. There are
> billions of devices left to be built in the next decade, and plenty of
> room for innovation, and the best, not necessarily the cheapest, like
> tp-link - will win - and it's my hope that certain values we have here
> will propagate into the successful products. We're not particularly
> good at final products, however.
>
> ... I had a nice visit over at eero yesterday. Their CTO greeted me
> with a flash stick outstretched, containing their (debian-based) code.
> ;) I was very impressed that they went from kickstarter to a US-wide
> launch of their product(s), with enough people, and with a business
> model that makes sense (selling three 2-radio diversity meshed routers
> at a time to get better coverage (and improve margins)), that they
> seem to understand the need for remote updates deeply, AND the need to
> make things simple for ordinary users. They also seem to grok things
> we are really bad at, like getting finished products on shelves.
>
> ... and I'm going to order a couple, 'cause their wifi is not as good
> as it could be (nobody's is), and he said I could visit periodically
> with make-wifi-fast's upcoming fixes. https://eero.com/
>
> > the cznic team has already done this.
> >
> > https://omnia.turris.cz/en/
>
> I am rooting for them, also, hard! They've made all the right choices
> technically and it's (aside from the wifi, currently) the best chipset
> possible from an open source perspective. They - unlike nearly all the
> home router makers and CPE vendors, have a perspective driven by the
> problems they've seen by being a registrar. They have money in the
> bank, and low costs, and an idealism about open design that seems
> rooted in the maker movement. I'd love to see this market
> arduinotized.
>
> It would be my hope, that with another year's worth of software
> development that their design would be suitable for more mass market
> CPE, particularly to ISPs in the fiber space. (And that they will be
> essentially first to have better wifi as I plan to get stuff working
> on that board as soon as I get one in my hot little hands).
>
> A huge percentage of the former "home router" market is going away as
> more and more ISPs bundle the router/wifi and other options into a
> single device. That concerns me a lot, and the only thing I can think
> of worth doing there is to join this org: http://rdkcentral.com/ and
> encourage others to also do so.
>
> Still, there has to be a lower cost option (for which I'm mostly
> chasing mediatek, and sad to have had to have dropped both netgear and
> tp-link from further consideration).
>
> - but who knows - with serious volumes, on a standardized platform
> that gets 100ks of deployments by ISPs, manufactured for the long
> term, the omnia's costs could drop significantly enough to be
> competitive with cheap crap, or, as in the raspberry pi market, a
> whole new segment using more standardized firmware will emerge.
>
> I'd really like to see more devices interoperate in the IoT, as well,
> things like making mdns scale better, ipv6 work with naming more
> right, etc - perhaps this new wave of folk entering the market  - and
> others exiting - might actually be able to pull more of the pieces
> together.
>
> >
> > --
> > P Vixie
> > _______________________________________________
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>



-- 
Jay Maynard, K5ZC
http://www.conmicro.com
http://www.hercules-390.org
http://www.tronguy.net (Yes, that's me!)
http://jmaynard.livejournal.com
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