Yes, it may very well be the most successful router ever sold, but have you thought about how many new models were NOT sold because the oldie WRT54G was chugging along all too well?
Unfortunately what is good for consumers in this case is bad for companies, because it reduces long term sales.
Some candidate reasons: Open source is still to different and hence risky. Or maybe arrogance and not invented here syndrome.
Imagine if they kept pumping out updated hardware supporting DD-WRT over the years, and eventually captured 80+% of the home networking market. Now consider that, during that time, a generation of future networking engineers cut their teeth on hi-po Linksys home routers, giving Linksys a segue into the lucrative enterprise market as this generation of people started gaining influence.
This ended up being one of magical events that could have been the turning point for a small, unknown company to take on a giant, and win. Instead, the opportunity was squished through a smart acquisition by Cisco.
for instance, home routers do data and control plane processing on a single CPU with no or very little NPU involved, while enterprise gear has this functionality.
not to mention the large array of technologies that are not even usable in small scale networks like VXLAN, BGP, IPVPN etc..
Some Small Business may have used Linksys but they would not have been buying cisco kit in most cases.
Because it just works and refuse do die.
The WRT54GL doesn’t have a fully open firmware—the WiFi remains closed—and has so little RAM and flash that OpenWRT, that started with the WRT54G, no longer supports it. DD-WRT is creeping in the same direction.
IPv6 support is more off than on. It’s never going to support DoT, WPA3, or other modern security measures. Most of the world is urbanized, and in an urban setting it’s a bit rude to use 54 Mbps 802.11g on the 2.4 GHz channels.
If you’re using it for an internal network on a farm, it’s fine, but if you’re in today’s world then you need to support today’s protocols.
I live in a residential neighbourhood, my router has both 5 GHz ac and 2.4 GHz. I run it in 2.4 GHz 802.11n mode.
Arguably worse!
Just because others behave badly or worse doesn’t give you the moral right to do badly.
We don’t need to be perfect. If everybody did as politely as we could, and did what we could to help others behave as politely as they could, then I think everybody would be better off. Well, “polite” is not quite a direct translation of the concept I have in mind… I’m not sure how to communicate it in English.
54Mbps vs 600Mbps for just 2.4Ghz, and using 5Ghz gets you to over 1Gbps.
Not accounting for real world losses/overhead, but that would hold true for the WRT54G.
Except that 2 times was crashed and then start with blank settings.
Sell a whizzy router with go fast blue LEDs for $150 that dies after 3 years and you make $750 in 15 years.
Advertise it with some “value add” MITM dns hijacking by default and you can even get a recurrent revenue stream on top of it. Bundle it as “Internet security” and you can charge bothe the customer and the advertiser.
I've purchase other Linksys stuff and few mine friends bought new routers because of mine recommendation.
But that was before they switch to VxWorks OS. Once they switch i didn't recommend them anymore.
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