Linksys Resurrects WRT54G In a New Router 310
jones_supa writes "A year after purchasing the Linksys home networking division from Cisco, Belkin today brought back the design of what it called 'the best-selling router of all time' but with the latest wireless technology. We are talking about the classic WRT54G, the router in blue/black livery, first released in December 2002. Back in July 2003, a Slashdot post noted that Linksys had 'caved to community pressure' after speculation that it was violating the GPL free software license, and it released open source code for the WRT54G. The router received a cult following and today the model number of the refreshed model will be WRT1900AC. The radio is updated to support 802.11ac (with four antennas), the CPU is a more powerful 1.2GHz dual core, and there are ports for eSATA and USB mass storage devices. Linksys is also providing early hardware along with SDKs and APIs to the developers of OpenWRT, with plans to have support available when the router becomes commercially available. The WRT1900AC is also the first Linksys router to include a Network Map feature designed to provide a simpler way of managing settings of each device connected to the network. Announced at Consumer Electronics Show, the device is planned to be available this spring for an MSRP of $299.99."
Re:Cost? (Score:5, Interesting)
How is the IPv6 support now? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Cost? (Score:5, Interesting)
Considering I built my current router is a low-power dual core 2.0GHz x64 CPU with 4GB DDR3 RAM, 16GB SATA-III SSD and 5 gigabit Ethernet ports for ~$200, it shouldn't be too hard to add a wireless card for around $100 and call it a day.
Re:Cost? (Score:5, Interesting)
Power consumption would be an issue with desktop hardware. I bought a brand new Alix kit (board, case and power adapter) from Ebay for less than $200 and run m0n0wall on it. It might not scale well with higher speed connections on the order of 50+ mbits but for my 20mbit cable, its more than enough. The only drawback is you need a mini-pci WIFI adapter if you want built in wifi and support is somewhat limited. I simply use an external WAP which is connected to a separate LAN port. I can filter traffic between the LAN and wifi networks to give me a bit more security as the wireless network can't talk to the LAN save for a few ports (SSH and http). I also disabled the router management for the wifi network, you must be on the hard wired LAN to configure the router.
Up time can be measured in years if there is no power loss. And the power consumption is around 5 watts. That is around 50 cents a month in electric costs, less than LED or CFL bulbs. Its even a bit smaller than the WAP54g. You can't go wrong for the price.
Re:Cost? (Score:4, Interesting)
First, 80 grand is $40/hr.
Second, the fully burdened COST of employing someone at a salary of $40/hr is at least $80/hr. THAT is the COST of the labor.