Technology

While I agree in general that turnkey solutions for access points (not routers) are largely preferable I must point out that it is at least possible to achieve 802.11ax with DD-WRT: https://openwrt.org/toh/views/toh_available_16128_ax-wifi for example, as I found out from this excellent post: https://lemmy.ninja/post/224052

That post also does a fantastic job of explaining the inherent issues of dealing with wifi hardware from an open source perspective.

Features like Mu-MIMO/beam forming that call for arrays of antenna are a part of the respective WiFi specifications, and are baked into the closed firmware of the radios. While manufacturers will fight hard to make you believe they are implementing something special, the fact is that they must abide by the WiFi standards and are just rebranding things built into the radios they buy. Hence even FOSS software can implement them. Check out this thread I found which describes what’s going on:

https://forum.dd-wrt.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=1215880

What troubles me about the ap/router combos from Asus and the like is that they they charge so much for so little, and they have a history of being generally shitty: https://www.pcworld.com/article/447083/netgear-accuses-asus-of-submitting-fraudulent-test-results-to-the-fcc.html

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2016/02/asus-settles-ftc-charges-insecure-home-routers-cloud-services-put-consumers-privacy-risk

It was these same companies that claimed gigabits of wifi throughput, when they were in fact advertising the combined speed of three antennas over two bands. No one device would ever see the speed they slapped on the package. Heck even if they did, grandma probably can’t appreciate the fact that faster wifi doesn’t mean shit if you have a 20/3 asynchronous dsl connection.

The specialised hardware - ASICS that push packets - are what allow them to include megabytes of RAM and tiny amounts of storage along with extremely anemic CPUs. Very little if any of this is designed in house, they pick components or even an entire SoC, lay out a board, test it and ship it with a nauseating markup. Those ASICS aren’t expensive: they’re in the most basic switches, and the super duper wifi hardware is just a rebadged product from another company. This isn’t really a criticism, it just means that they are efficient and low power but hardly unique. It is though an observation that even the high end router/ap combos are far from bleeding edge tech worthy of the high prices they charge, imho. Why the fuck is 10GbE still so expensive in 2023? There are 10 year old SATA3 drives that can saturate a GigE uplink.

The software side usually consists of a minimised Linux build often running a myriad of the same open source software running on DIY builds. Back in the bad old days it even took some pressure to get them to abide by the respective OSS licenses and give their code back to the communities they were using to make money.

They’re charging a premium for very low spec hardware, and not doing a great deal to earn their keep.

Finally while these companies are now being forced to provide updates, they are still shipping products with security issues:

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/asus-urges-customers-to-patch-critical-router-vulnerabilities/

One of the most relevant examples from that article being: ‘The other critical patch is for an almost five-year-old CVE-2018-1160 bug caused by an out-of-bounds write Netatalk weakness that can also be exploited to gain arbitrary code execution on unpatched devices.’

So while I can agree that a DIY Wifi AP will likely cause a certain amount of avoidable grief, I simply can’t abide by the notion that OPNsense or PFsense is unable to offer feature parity with COTS routers.

As an addendum, if my $100 x86 router can route 1GbE as well as a $300 RGB monstrosity, what are they bringing to the party exactly? Why should we indulge that? Why should we tolerate such gratuitous bullshit?