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Comment by ShabbyDoo | Hacker News Reader

I posted this "Ask HN" awhile back about my desire to pay for a router-as-a-service:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1160585

What surprised me was the number of responses along the lines of "you don't need this -- just install DD-WRT, OpenWRT, whatever and configure the foo,bar, and baz features as such." I'm likely in the 99th percentile of the US population in my ability to do such a thing, and I still have to spend a bunch of time Googling. Worse yet, I don't have the certainty at the end that I've done it right.

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Buffalo ships a router with DD-WRT preinstalled.

http://www.buffalotech.com/products/wireless/wireless-router...

I'm using the 'stock' DD-WRT firmware on mine, and it handles its duty as a VPN endpoint, a Tunnelbroker endpoint, and does significant QoS'ing without a problem.

A good start. Does Buffalo offer any sort of SLA which promises timely firmware updates? What scares me about buying a router is that vendors silently stop supporting them. So, while grandma's grandson might have turned on automatic firmware updates, widely known security issues might not be patched after a year or two.

One of the guys did answer you with:

[We do sell this but] We limit the number of offices in a minimum order to 10. This was a hard lesson. We started off dreamy-eyed with onesies and twosies but were rapidly buried under a sea of "and it also has to...".

Pretty much says it all.

Also over here in the UK you get a free wi-fi router when you sign up for broadband from the major providers. No QoS, but auto-updating. Do you not get that where you are? If they do, where's the market? The router shelf space in local stores has already dwindled down to a single dusty shelf from the aisles it used to dominate.

In the US, it depends on the provider. The two giant cable telecoms I've dealt with charged ~$5/month for a wifi router which is really highway robbery - especially considering the quality of the routers they provided. Their provided cablemodems were pretty much universally awful too, so you were better off buying both your own modem and router - but they obviously didn't advertise that you could do this, if you weren't technically savvy you'd never have a clue. One friend I helped out was amazed that they could get wifi without paying TW $5/month and how much better it worked without TW's equipment.

I'm currently on Qwest (formerly anyway, now acquired by CenturyLink) DSL. Qwest provided an excellent modem/wifi router for free, but I have no idea if CenturyLink would do the same now - I kind of suspect the giant teleco would probably provide inferior equipment and/or charge for it.

> amazed that they could get wifi without paying TW $5/month

Hm. I'm kind of amazed leasing a router from TW wasn't written into the contract.

I realize you're quite possibly kidding, but it's just an optional extra - quick call to TW then swapping the wifi modem for a plain old modem and it's off the bill. Easier than cancelling HBO certainly.

Doesn't Meraki do what you asked for?

Meraki is severely over priced and focused on enterprise users. They are not a consumer product.

the bufferbloat project's end goal is to get to where the default firmware on everything is good out of the box, and that involves trying to fix upstream for the kernel, tools, and distros, so vendors take it and run with it.

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