Linksys's über-hackable WRT wireless router REBORN with 802.11ac Networking gear maker Linksys has resurrected one of its most popular, customizable routers – the WRT54G – with a new version that takes advantage of the latest wireless technologies. The Belkin subsidiary revealed the new device, a spruced-up Wi-Fi router based on its venerable WRT54G design, at the Consumer Electronics Show …
And pray tell why the majority of people would need or want a hackable router?
This is hardly aimed at the majority of people. I'd think it's aimed more at the folk who've built an x86 router because there's nothing reasonably priced commercially available to meet their needs. For those folk this isn't unreasonable.
As for the psu, I'm an n of one, but my wrt54g has been running 2x7 for nine years 4 months. I have no problem with its longevity.
That would be the EoL Cisco 1800's?
No. Only the modular models have been EOLed. Those were the fixed-configuration SDSL + switch model (1803?), still very much a current product. The 1900 series hasn't been fleshed out with direct replacements for the fixed models as yet.
My Vigor lasted 7 years before the ADSL bit of it finally croaked and wouldn't sync at a decent rate.
VOIP, VPN, etc. Fairly good ROI if you ask me.
I'd guess that Linksys believe this is the last router purchasers will buy for quite some time and are pricing accordingly.
My WRT54G has an external PoE adapter on it, so it doesn't need the power supply and I don't have to site it near a power socket. Provided they've kept the consumption of this one under 15W there's no reason why the same trick can't be tried on it. However, $300 is a bit eye-watering.
Of course it could be done if it were using a stable software stack and quality config. If the old (Linksys) WRT54 firmwares are anything to go off, the thing will use 700mA with the radios on, ramping up to 1200mA after 24 hours, causing Wi-Fi drop-outs, dropped WAN connections, etc. Of course it will crash a day or two later and the on-board capacitors and the (under-specced) power supply will fail before the 2nd year is out.
This really is Deja Vu....
OMFG: Imagine spending $300 and still have to install an unsupported firmware as the pre-loaded firmware can't maintain Wi-Fi or WAN uptime and Linksys simply do not fix the truckload of bugs they shipped it with. And if it doesn't drop out somehow or shut down, it'll run hot and sound like a swarm of mosquitoes.
Now OpenWRT, DD-WRT and Tomato et al are all good/great but hardly not every release has the polish we like to think they have. Not like the way they could be if Linksys just funded OpenWRT to deliver a really stable, well featured and properly supported firmware.
Instead, your $300 pays for a $4 PCB, an $8 power adapter, a box and a few $10 components. The other $250 goes on the Linksys/Belkin dev team for cobbling together a downloaded stack of hacked together development code and combining it with some proprietary shite from some Broadcom and Realtek, and calling it a production release when it is just a beta or more likely, an alpha.
Of course that flies with most people as the firmware hacking community can retrofit, fix and upgrade the stack without any technical hand-over or resources from the factory team, who by that time have done a preverbial 'dump and run' (as far from the project as they can).
To be successful, they need an open a github repo, add some public change management and set a date to begin working collaboratively with people like OpenWRT prior to the release. They'd need to maintain the initial release and fund and resource the open firmware teams- and perhaps setup a release/lifecycle with them before abandoning it at version 1.0 like they did last time.
Exactly. In this day and age, there's no reason whatsoever for a home router - no matter how fancily equipped - to cost more than $50. If Belkin/Cisco/Linksys insists on taxing enthusiasts to the bone like that, they'll just use whatever cheap generic hackable hardware they can get their hands on, emphasis on cheap. Before something is widely supported it has to be popular first, and this will never be that with such a price tag.
Is OpenWrt secure? OpenWrt has had multiple root exploits, as has DD-WRT. Do we know exactly who has committed changes to each OpenWrt release?
I personally would tend to prefer a lower performance router running a known solid set of software, such as one of the venerable Tomato builds... At least you know who to blame for any backdoors in Tomato :)
"Is OpenWrt secure? OpenWrt has had multiple root exploits, as has DD-WRT. Do we know exactly who has committed changes to each OpenWrt release?"
First of all, Belkin doesn't exabctly have a Midas touch when it comes to drivers, firmware, software. Quite the opposite really.
At least with WRT we can eliminate that part. Besides, you can verify the WRT source code yourself according to FOSS evangelists. Add to that the proprietary binary driver for the actual wireless radio chip from Broadcom/Atheros/Ralink without documentation...
"Tomato"
Tomato was a splendid upgrade for my Buffalo WHR-HP-G54 AP's, but does Tomato support anything beyond 802.11g and has it been updated for ages? I have a faster internet connection than what 802.11g can deliver and my current Buffalo N's have DD-WRT fw installed.
I am running 802.11bgn (20 or 40MHz channels) on an ASUS RT-N16 with Tomato firmware from Jonathan Zarate. It has USB drive support, VPN integration. Take another look at the various Tomato versions, even this one has been around for quite some years now...
(Specifically Tomato Firmware v1.28.9054 MIPSR2-beta K26 USB vpn3.6 )
>>Re: "you can verify the WRT source code yourself"
>Something of an exaggeration for many of us
Which is why you say the public together can audit the source code which is better probably than any one person anyway. The problem as implied above is with binary blobs. Not sure if OpenWRT is using them (edit: verified it isn't on my router as the drivers are all open source but YMMV) but if they are all bets are off as that is where the NSA would go for anyway.
"Something of an exaggeration for many of us"
True, but if the bug/hack is simply to reset to default user/password, why not change your copy of the source so the defaults are different, and thus not a walk-over for anyone able to force a remote reset?
This is the inexplicably high price of freedom...and the value of something that cosys nothing. Realising people value freedom, the manufacturers inflate the price, without spending any extra on software development, and make greater profits. Are people who buy this freedom fools, rebels or just victims of commercial exploitation?
So Linksys, sorry Belkin (the same people selling gold plated modem cable - to improve performance), are offering a cheapish router, running software designed by others for free and obviously without any support cost (except basic hardware) as most will not run stock software.
Sounds like a good business plan at $/£300 a piece, but I won't join the queue to get one...
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And I have vowed never to buy any of their tat. But this I like, and I might have to make an exception (once the price comes down).
$299 really is steep, maybe too steep. I used to own a pair of WRT54GS and they were cheap as chips even when brand new (ended up running Tomato on them in the end). Now that Belkin/Linksys officially approve of third party firmware, is the high price some sort of open source premium (aka gouging)?
Would be nice if they included an ADSL2+ modem in this as well. And frankly, for the price they're charging, it should have it already.
First of all, it is the WRT54GL (Linux based) not the 54G that is most useful. I still use those (all over town!) and can still get them. I use DD-WRT on them and they are rock solid. They cost about $79 CAD here in Bumfuck Ontario Canada.
Furthermore, this new router is going to be too expensive. Almost 3 times? They can make those fit, sideways.
Finally, I have always hated Belkin routers. No new ones for me, now that Linksys is Belkin. I'll use one of the many others capable of running Linux firmware when I can no longer get the old ones.
I found that my WRT54GL routers with DD-WRT are starting to factory-reset randomly every month or two. Since a reset router (user:admin pw:admin) directly exposes your network to the Internet I have assumed some new 0-day is in the wild, and have gotten rid of DD-WRT in favor of Tomato -- which has been running for years on some of my routers, and has never factory-reset on me...
I have no experience with Open-WRT, but the commit process seemed to chaotic when I last looked into it...
Mine was doing the same (with Tomato) a while ago also leaving it horribly exposed. It turned out to be crashing following cable outages. I learned to back up the config - but it's not happened for a while. I also found that leaving the thing switched off for a couple of hours helped when flashing it's memory.
It's sort of nice that the WRT54GL is such a stable target, as in never changing, but I don't see a good reason why I should spend so much money on such an obsolete device.
54Mbps 802.11g, stuck on a Linux 2.4 kernel
100Mbps Ethernet
200MHz MIPS CPU
16MB RAM
4MB flash
For $80 in 2014
This is just sad.
For that price, I'd rather get a Buffalo WZR-600DHP:
"600Mbps" dual-channel 802.11n
Gigabit Ethernet, with a separate Ethernet interface on the WAN port
680MHz MIPS CPU
128MB RAM
32MB flash
USB port
It even comes with DD-WRT, and is extremely compatible with OpenWRT. The platform is also very similar to the CeroWRT platform (Netgear WNDR3800), so it shouldn't be too difficult to adapt.
The original version of the WRT54G was the basis for DD-WRT and OpenWRT. The model was pretty popular for it's day, so Linksys made new versions, with different (cheaper) hardware, but kept the same box and name. This caused enough of a backlash from people who were spending a little extra to buy a Linksys router so that they could use DD-WRT, only to find the the new versions were incompatible, that Linksys introduced the WRT54GL (at a small price premium) to address the concerns of those customers who were buying the hardware so that they could run their own software on it.
Over the years, Linksys used 5 or 6 different versions of Broadcom chipsets, and for version 7.0 of the WRT54G, they switched to an Artheros chipset. All without changing the name of the thing they were selling.
It's hacker friendly... with special "I'm a hacker" pricetag.
I'm sure there's a market for it, but openwrt runs on an lot of cheaper boxes;
Since you didn't ask I'm tending to use Buffalo routers nowadays, have several Buffalo WZR-HP-AG300H's in action and they're splendid; separate 2.4 + 5.8G radios (lovely performance on 5.8), tons of flash+ram, usb for gadget-making, gig-e for speed, fast cpu, run openwrt or dd-wrt depending on yr needs, under a hundred bucks, reliable, end of story. Old news but a fine piece of cheap hardware. Hell I may order another one for hacking on - the Atheros chipset has a spectrum analyzer mode I need to tinker with
I hardly think so. Look at all the other products that use ARM SoC. Off the top of my head, there are systems like Raspberry Pi, MK808, ODROID, Beaglebone Black and huge numbers of cheap Chinese Android phones and tablets. Many of them have dual core or better. Granted, the engineering work needed to add high-speed networking to the system (and fab the chips) is going to make it more expensive than most of these options, but the basic ARM CPU/SoC certainly doesn't explain the high price. To me it looks like they're charging an enormous premium based solely on the reputation the original 54g line had as being hacker-friendly. This isn't the first time that this has happened: at one point in the evolution of the product, they brought out a new revision that actually had less memory than the existing models. Then they reissued it as WRT54GL, and justified charging the same (or more) for it just because it had an 'L' (for Linux) at the end of the model name.
Loads of features, gives as good a performance as my old Draytek before it and costs less than a third of this Linksys.
5GHz wi-fi is very handy living in a city centre too.
http://uk.tp-link.com/products/details/?categoryid=219&model=TD-W8980#down
This new Linksys one is ethernet only - the one you suggested includes a DSL modem. A closer TP-Link comparison would be the Archer C7 (http://www.tp-link.com/lk/products/details/?model=Archer+C7). I'd personally go for the TL-WDR4900 though - fantastic CPU and OpenWrt support, just lacking 802.11ac.
It would be great if this Linksys one did include a modem too, as that would mean they'd most likely be publishing the source for the modem drivers too (which is very rare), but sadly that's not the case.
Are there any cheaper WLAN routers out there that support 802.11AC? The cheapest 802.11AC access point I can find is a D-Link DAP-2695 at around £230.
I wouldn't get one myself, but it doesn't seem too extreme if you are looking for a gigabit WLAN network for your home.
My bad - yes, I did miss them when I searched...
The TRENDnet unit seems to be fairly basic in comparison for around £80/US$120 - the similarly specced Netgear unit is still around £190 (or US$200) is still a bit cheaper but lacks eSATA.
Pricing still isn't that terrible as you may still get more features.
I can't disagree, that TRENDnet will have things missing and they may be show stoppers so I would not jump at it. I dislike much of the base level unknown brand stuff from the far east because it seems to built to get the sale rather than still work in six months time.
If I'm honest I thought about £120 would be the absolute bottom end for AC access points before I searched so maybe Linksys are hoping we are all thinking Shiny New = £300.
I like the Asus routers (with Merlin or DD-WRT) and still run an old Buffalo G45HP (tomato or DD-WRT) if I'm going to leave it on for a few days during electrical storms. One thing I never liked about the original WRT was the shonky blue case, not quite sure why they have iterated that, makes me think of the 90's Skoda.
I suppose once the price stabilises and the extra features are invented it will be a very useful tool but with £300 in my pocket (today) I'd probably look at Vigor simply because I've run (with a few exceptions) those for thousands of hours between reboots, forgo a few features for it being a reliable workhorse.
I am still running an original WRT54GS with White Russian on it. Most of the time it lives at the back of the house where the main wifi signal does not reach. Every so often, when whichever cheap router I've bought most recently dies, it is pressed into service as the main house router.
It has never failed to deliver the goods. In fact, just last week it finished a 6 month stint front of house - not bad going for what must be an 8 year old router in a house containing several web sites handling dozens of concurrent users* (the previous brand new TP-Link only lasted 4 months total before burning out).
So, if the new incarnation has the longevity of the old, then $299 is not so much to pay. Or pick one up second hand for less.
* yes, I realise there are websites that handle more traffic than this
> WRT54GS with White Russian
Ok for stability but not so much for performance. The first requirement of firmware I use is it supports fq_codel which requires Linux kernel 3.3 or newer. Attitude Adjustment (OpenWRT) has it, it works well and AA is as stable as White Russian in my experience. Without fq_codel you end up needing many more firewall and tc rules to get the router to behave well under load which matters if you have kids and wife with phones and or tablets and a love of streaming and you enjoy twitch gaming.
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It's one of the first wave of 802.11ac routers, which typically cost around 200 USD around here. As far as I know, the OpenWRT "supported hardware" page lists none of the existing -ac models (e.g. ASUS) as being supported. I can see in the OpenWRT forums that some people have just managed to make the new Atheros chips with -AC support (ath10k driver, qca988x hardware) work in OpenWRT at a basic level: driver + hostapd. This happend shortly before X-mas 2013. If the supposed support and assistance from Linksys helps to push the Atheros ath10k 802.11ac into mainstream, including proper configuration methods in the UCI subsystem and proper documentation, kudos for that. If someone wants that guarantee of OpenWRT support in newly purchased hardware, that's fine.
As for the price... at the moment, for my needs = basic indoor coverage, I'll stick to TP-Link. The basic model TL-WR741ND costs about 27 USD around here. I can spend another 10 USD for an extra mains adaptor. I can also run the router for a while, then say "who cares about warranty" and replace the cheap capacitors inside with solid polymer and MLCC. The last generation of TP-Link AP's are significantly cleaner and emptier on the inside: there are fewer chips, elyts and buck converters, and the current Atheros chipset runs pretty cool. Once the capacitors are beefed up, this is likely to have a pretty long service life. And all the recent TP-Links, including the higher-end dual-band WDR models (802.11n), are supported by OpenWRT.
The one thing that I don't like about the top-end dual-radio SoHo AP's (including TP-Link) is that the two radioes (2.4 and 5 GHz) share common antenna ports for the two bands - so that you can have simultaneous traffic on both radioes (NIC's visible on the PCI bus inside), but via a single set of shared dual-band antennas. Dual-band antennas are expensive and technically almost impossible to make right, it's down to basic wavelength physic. Splitters are also difficult and expensive to make.
If the new WRT54G-AC is going to have 4 antenna ports, that might as well mean separate ports for 2.4 and 5 GHz (times 2 per band for MIMO) - that would be excellent news, as it would allow you to use decent single-band antennas for either frequency band.
I actually used to consider hacking some current TP-Link to add separate antenna outputs on my own - the radio paths can be clearly identified on the PCB from the radio power stages to the passive crossover that mixes them into the shared antenna port. If the separate per-band antenna ports should take off across the industry, that would be good news.
The separate per-band antenna ports might well be worth the money for some users - they are a way to achieve best-in-class and customizable radio coverage in both bands.
And if these were really four dual-band antenna ports, standing for 4T4R MIMO, that would also be a first machine of its class. Although 4T4R MIMO is theoretically supported by 802.11n already, I've never seen actual hardware that would support that.
P.S.: I just wish anyone would kill the CRDA...
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