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Comment by stephengillie | Hacker News Reader

> The only reason there's such an upgrade cycle for consumer routers is that they're built shoddily and with the slowest CPU possible.

A lot of this is that consumers have been taught that routing, NAT, etc isn't done by a general purpose computing device like a PC or server, but that those tasks MUST be relegated to an appliance.

But compute is compute, and antennas are antennas. And the word "appliance" has long held a secret meaning of "a Linux server on your Windows (or local area) network."

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I hadn't actually put those thoughts together - which is funny considering I've been working a lot with embedded boards lately.

So.... how could you custom-build something akin to say, the Netgear Nighthawk (Netgear R8000)? I'm thinking multiple 802.11ac antennae with all that new multi-user beamforming stuff that's been released lately. Is there open firmware that supports that / do the commodity Linux drivers support controlling and fine-tuning that kind of function?

Added: Interesting.... There's an x86 port of DD-WRT:

http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/X86

All the fancy wifi stuff is part of the wifi chipset, which most router vendors tend not to have any hand in - especially for consumer stuff. (also, beamforming is a very misleading term). You can basically buy a card that does all this stuff 'off the shelf', and could even plug it into a laptop. Though, antenna placement may be something you'd need to do some research on.

My router runs dd-wrt and cost me 50$. It uses iptables for a firewall and only burns 12W max. That's hard to beat going the custom route.

consumers have been taught that routing, NAT, etc isn't done by a PC or server, but MUST be relegated to an appliance.

Because that's far more reliable. People don't want their whole home's Internet to go down every time they reboot their computer (and buying an extra computer to do routing is a big waste of money/complexity). Not to mention households that only have laptops.

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