Netgear Launches Open Source-Friendly Wireless Router

An anonymous reader submits news of Netgear's release of the "open source Wireless-G Router (model WGR614L), enabling Linux developers and enthusiasts to create firmware for specialized applications, and supported by a dedicated open source community. The router supports the most popular open source firmware; Tomato and DD-WRT are available on WGR614L, making it easier for users to develop a wide variety of applications. The router is targeted at people who want custom firmware on their router without worrying about issues, and enjoy the benefits of having an open source wireless router."

What's the point of a new wireless-G one?

[mrchaotica]

Here in 2008, I'm only interested in Free Software-friendly 802.11 N routers. Anybody know of any?

Problems...

[Darkness404]

It always seems that whenever a company releases something open-source they have to make at least one component proprietary. As this allows Open-WRT to be installed on it perhaps it is really open, but just about every device that uses something open-source has something that makes it hard to install something new on it or they don't use a 100% open source OS (examples, N800, EEE PC, TiVo, etc)

Losing Marketshare to Linksys

[MBCook]

So they finally decided to stop handing the Linux tweakable router market to Linksys/Cisco, huh? Let's see, how long did that take?

According to Wikipedia, Linksys cut hardware back on their routers and released the hackable WRT54GL in 2005. So they've done nothing but ignore this market for nearly 4 years.

Took someone else long enough.

no USB?

[speedtux]

Come on, guys, put four USB ports on there and then we're talking. Without it, it's really limited.

Older hardware is cheaper, its on the shelf

[gelfling]

Netgear doesn't make money on firmware. They make money selling routers. So if this sells more routers, then fine. But don't look to them to start cannibalizing their sales of Super-G, MiMo or N routers to sell more older on the shelf gear. 614 routers are themselves, fairly old probably as old internally as Linksys open routers. All they did was tweak the gear slightly in light of cheaper hardware now vs 3 years ago.

BTW, I LOVED my 624v3 Super-G Netgear router, for the 12 months it lasted. Then last month the wireless piece of it conked out. I replaced it with an 824v2 with all internal diversity antennas so the fact that Netgear cheaped out and never built replaceable antenna couplings is moot.

Re:What's the point of a new wireless-G one?

[Free the Cowards]

Keep it in enterprise hardware, but for consumers, make a clean break.

You're kind of missing the point. The claim was that the need for backwards compatibility was part of what was making it so difficult to finalize the standard. If you keep it in enterprise hardware then the problem is still there! You could have two standards, I suppose, one "consumer" standard that makes a clean break and one "enterprise" standard that's backwards compatible, but that kind of defeats the whole purpose of having a standard in the first place.

Personally, my house has a lot of g-only devices, and I'm glad that I can serve everything off a single router.

Re:no USB?

[Grishnakh]

Is this some kind of joke? What the hell do you need USB for? The only thing a wireless access point and router needs is 1) an input ethernet port, for connecting to your cable/DSL modem, 2) 4 output ethernet ports, for connecting to your wired machines (including printer), and 3) antennae for your wireless devices.

I do tend to agree with the other reply to this; any newer router needs gigabit ports on the output. It's pretty annoying that all my machines have GbE, but can only talk to each other at 100 Mb/s because of the router they're connected through (which admittedly is an older model). If Netgear or someone else released an open-source-friendly wireless router with 802.1n and GbE ports for the internal network, that would probably be attractive enough to me to decide to upgrade from my current D-Link. As it is, just being open-source-friendly isn't quite enough to get me to upgrade; as long as my current router works, I don't have much to complain about. Unfortunately, my D-Link barely works right: I'm unable to upgrade the firmware to the newer versions, because then it won't allow wirelessly-connected devices to access my JetDirect-connected HP printer. I've emailed D-Link about it and they don't care.

Re:Tomato and DD-WRT is not open nor free;use open

[mpoulton]

MOD PARENT UP. I wish I had points. I used to be a rabid fan of DD-WRT, and I still believe it is the best firmware out there for the WRT series routers. However, the project leader (Brainslayer) has recently started to close source certain parts of the project, and it seems he is working to make it unusable in open-source form (i.e. requires proprietary code to function at all). Basically, he's pulling a Sveasoft move here and screwing a great number of the people who donated time and money to make the system work in the first place.

Really?

[Velorium]

About fucking time. Now only if they get some USB dongles out too that have drivers Linux compatible that don't use two to three different chipsets under the same product name. My WG111v2 works great on XP but is terribly hard to get a consistent connection on linux with no open-source drivers (Ubuntu works out of the box but will drop if too many packets come through at a time or something. Seems whenever I do anything data intensive it gets angry with me.)

Nice!

[ProfessionalCookie]

Late to the game, but quite welcome! Also see Ubiquity [ubnt.com].

Cheers, Ed

Re:Older hardware is cheaper, its on the shelf

[gelfling]

Yeah but with routers it's a straight trade off between RAM and ROM size and manufacturing cost. I bet Netgear and Linksys have or had warehouses full of these older G routers or, they had very long job contracts with Solectron and similar spec manufacturing companies. They have to use the inventory or the production runs and it's probably cheaper to tweak the hardware a little bit to accommodate Tomato etc than it is to write off the bulk of it. And, if all goes well they instill a little goodwill with the hobby community and get a peak into some of the requested features they don' deliver.

Hell, if they play their cards right, commodity routers could all be sold w/o any firmware at all and Netgear and Linksys could save dollars (or Yuan) not having to develop it or support it all. I've often wondered why they would even bother creating v1, v2, v3 and so on of what is essentially the same hardware with the same features and performance if they didn't have to worry about hardware requirements versioning.

Re:What's the point of a new wireless-G one?

[cayenne8]

"I know there are practical reasons for backward compatibility, but we need to get off our love affair with it. Keep it in enterprise hardware, but for consumers, make a clean break. There's no reason why we can't have an abundance of cheap 802.11b/g devices and a separate class of devices for 802.11n. There's no reason one can't run both if one needs both. The convenience offered by a single package just makes it worse for everyone in the long run."

Honest question here....is there any problem with linux running g and n?

I've not tried to deal with anything but 'b'...and when I started to try to get wireless going with linux..it was a bitch to get things working...and I've not needed to upgrade lately...hell, WEP was something that was hard to do.

I've got a bunch of boxes with 'b' that I finally go going...can I new swap out for the newer g and n cards and they will just work? Not trolling...just wanting some tips on what I might have to change...etc...

TIA

Re:Problems...

[KGIII]

(Not intentionally trolling...) But, "so popular" with whom, for what? When I saw this thread I opened it thinking (I was being optimistic) that I'd find people in here debating all the great things that they'd do with it. I scrolled through and, well, I came across your post (and clicked even the link in your signature) because you said something was "so popular" and it was something I'd never heard of before. It turns out that I had seen them via another link or an industry magazine, or at least I think so, but I I don't recall the brand name. I don't recall them being used widely. I don't recall them at all really. So, well, I'm curious as to what they're so popular with or with whom they are so popular. (And yes, I'm legitimately curious.)

Re:What's the point of a new wireless-G one?

[houstonbofh]

802.11n operates on 5Ghz as well.

It's time to start ditching backward compatibility. Every refresh of the 802.11 spec does not have to have backward compatibility.

I provide the WiFi in hotels. I generally put between 10 and 15 APs in, and guess what I will use if that is the case? The old standard most guests have. Hell, some hotels still have 802.11b in them. Slightly better range than G, and still faster than the pipe they have. So if you loose backwards compatibility, I hope you don't want to use any hotspots.