[Discuss] Home Routers

[tmetro+blu at gmail.com (Tom Metro)]

Chris O'Connell wrote:
> ...anyone recommend a good router...that will allow me to make use of
> my new 50Mb download speeds?

I posted about this at some length on the hardware hacking list:
http://www.mail-archive.com/hardwarehacking at blu.org/msg00898.html

In summary, I don't think Tomato (which is the best of the 3rd party
firmwares for routers) has developed an adequate community to support
the product from a security standpoint. When was the last time you saw a
security update released for Tomato? How were you notified?

It hasn't helped matters that the project has forked into 3 or 4 related
branches, each with only one primary developer, some of whom freely
admit they aren't programmers.

It is possible to address security well with an open source project. I
think Debian, for example, seems to handle this well, with a dedicated
team. (Most of Ubuntu's security releases are passed through from
Debian.) The key is that it is a much larger community, so having
security focused volunteers is more practical.

Given this, and the increasing availability of low-cost, low-power
hardware that can run full Linux distributions, it would seem that using
consumer router hardware that is limited to running specialized
distributions supported by tiny communities is no longer the best option.

My recent research turned up a commercial router that looks quite promising:
http://www.ubnt.com/edgemax

It will be released in June, is expected to cost $100, runs a Debian
derivative, and claims to handle 1 million packets per second (using
acceleration hardware). They have a couple of head-to-head product
comparisons done by some third party testing company. One pits their
router against some Cisco model and some Juniper model. The other report
compares it against a $400 Mikrotik router. Of course it trounced all of
them on bandwidth, packet throughput, and latency.

What I'm more interested in is how good a job Ubiquiti Networks does at
passing on the security fixes from Debian. Will that be sustainable, if
you only pay them $100 every 3 to 5 years?

I don't know what their reputation is like on security support. It's a
new product, but Ubiquiti Networks has been around for several years
making WiFi access points and low cost router hardware. I'll be keeping
an eye open for reviews after it is released.

Ubiquiti aside, we should be seeing more hardware like this, with
similar performance and price points. Hopefully someone will release an
ARM board with a fast CPU and interfaces (2 Ethernet and possibly a
switch w/VLAN) designed for routing.

 -Tom

-- 
Tom Metro
Venture Logic, Newton, MA, USA
"Enterprise solutions through open source."
Professional Profile: http://tmetro.venturelogic.com/