It comes down to the age-old reality that many customers prefer to buy junk as long as it’s cheap. Obviously that restricts your talent pool and then manufacturers have to fill the gaps with whoever else they can find. In short, the people you find working in this area with real ability tend to be those who enjoy this kind of work enough to give up a lot of other benefits to do it. Now look at what a whole team of those people would earn collectively for writing router firmware and tell me which number is bigger, and look at their work environment and tell me where you’d rather be spending a significant fraction of your waking hours.
Look at the work environments they have in those roles. Look at what that person can earn working for a FAANG or a financial services firm, or the potential upside for them at a startup if they get in early and there is a big exit. Think about the kind of developer who has gained a few years of experience and has the skills and interest to do a good job solving challenging technical problems. To be blunt, a big part of the problem is money. The worst products I have ever had in my typical small-office work environments were the Cisco-branded “small business” range, which in specs and appearance did look like they were being pitched at that market, yet which never performed accordingly and mostly failed after an unreasonably short amount of time for equipment in this class. The thing I’d add is that it’s not just consumer-grade products with this problem, there are plenty of supposedly professional-grade devices where the firmware is junk too. Have one that works, and one that you can break without having to stay up all night to get online.Īs someone who has worked on firmware for network devices, including the UI/presentation aspect, I feel obliged to point out that there are people working in that part of the industry who take security seriously, and likewise there are people working in that part of the industry who take the presentation of both hardware and UIs seriously.Īt the same time, I can’t really disagree with the general sentiment that a lot of firmware in embedded devices, router or otherwise, is very poor. If you want to play with openwrt, it's a little saner to have two routers. It's a community build, but it is stable and works well. It's not in the main tree but I followed this thread:
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I sit it on the shelf for a good year.īecause I learned how to build openwrt, I also have two mikrotik rb3011uias-rm 10x gbe switches. My current router is a wrt-1900acs, which took a while to get stable. I got away from the GUI and now do most configuration via the config files in /etc/config.
It's actually quite straightforward after you get over the hump. If I was just getting on line with a couple computers, phones, and tv's I wouldn't have bothered to flash with openWRT.įirst I tried the tp-link TL-WDR4300, which was very well supported at the time.Īlong the way I went from a "regular install" of openwrt, to build the LEDE fork myself, then back to building openwrt. That said, I did have a number of non-standard things I wanted to do on my home network without paying thousands for enterprise level hardware so it was worth it for me to do that work. I really believe if you plan the project like you would a production project you'll have an extremely good experience. Now it only acts as a modem for the Zyxel.Īn important part of my experience is that I deliberately set out to buy a good router that was very well supported by openWRT, because in the past I have had experiences similar to your post (but with dd-wrt in the long long ago). The CPE from Comcast was so much slower and worse in every single way. It's better than the factory firmware in every way except user friendliness, but even that isn't bad unless you are trying to something more advanced. After that I had to configure it just as I would any new router. The flashing process was exactly the same as the factory firmware. I'm using openWRT on a Zyxel Armor Z2 router.
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