4 ms·

I'm just curious why so many wireless routers are flakey, need frequently reset, have connection issues, etc. That, and what Google is actually doing differentl

by tibbon 11y ago

I'm just curious why so many wireless routers are flakey, need frequently reset, have connection issues, etc. That, and what Google is actually doing differently than other high quality routers.

flurpitude 11y ago
To your first question: they're rushed out of the door in a hurry to catch the next trend, and have poor cooling and poor software. To your second question: other high quality routers don't enable Google to spy on you quite so effortlessly.
orky56 11y ago
Most the consumer hardware networking industry is based on costs. Components are sourced based on the lowest cost and quality tends to be prioritized for SMB/enterprise products. Typically, routers are relatively inelastic in demand and industrial design, brand recognition, and price point make up the decision criteria for consumers. Testing is mostly spent on integrating all these various components and very little is spent on general UI. I'm a bit wary on Google's approach unless they have some great QA process or are bringing higher quality components to consumers at a lower price point. (Used to work for one of the big consumer networking companies)
- wmf 11y ago
  Or they're selling this router at a loss by accounting the firmware as $0 so they can give the customer more for their money.
djhworld 11y ago
Google seem to be approaching their marketing from a consumers perspective, capitalising on the common experience of flakey WiFi and shitty tech support telling you that "turning it off, waiting 30 seconds and on again" should "solve" the problem. I'd imagine they've approached the design and development of this product from that angle too.
wtallis 11y ago
There's wide variation in hardware quality, but consumer-oriented stuff is a lot more likely to have thermal issues and crappy power supplies. For software, things are more uniformly bad. Almost every commercial router uses the drivers provided by the chipset vendor, and those are always bad. Even the poster child for open-source drivers (Atheros ath9k 802.11n) still had some nasty lockup bugs this year (eg. https://dev.openwrt.org/browser/trunk/package/kernel/mac80211/patches/379-ath9k-fix-DMA-stop-sequence-for-AR9003.patch?rev=45874 https://dev.openwrt.org/browser/trunk/package/kernel/mac8021...). The closed-source drivers get much less maintenance. And then the router vendors have a team of morons slap together a web interface where all the priorities are on branding, and none on actually exposing the right functionality of the underlying Linux system in a secure manner. And that's if they're even using Linux. OpenWRT makes an extremely powerful argument that the problems is the fragmentation of development instead of a single ongoing centralized project. The jury's still out on where this effort from Google will fall. They've got some people who definitely know what they're doing (eg. Avery Pennarun, though I don't know if he's involved with this). On the other hand, core networking performance and stability clearly isn't what they're emphasizing, and they appear to be using the same ath10k hardware and drivers as everyone else.

by tibbon 11y ago

I'm just curious why so many wireless routers are flakey, need frequently reset, have connection issues, etc. That, and what Google is actually doing differently than other high quality routers.

flurpitude 11y ago

To your first question: they're rushed out of the door in a hurry to catch the next trend, and have poor cooling and poor software. To your second question: other high quality routers don't enable Google to spy on you quite so effortlessly.

orky56 11y ago

Most the consumer hardware networking industry is based on costs. Components are sourced based on the lowest cost and quality tends to be prioritized for SMB/enterprise products. Typically, routers are relatively inelastic in demand and industrial design, brand recognition, and price point make up the decision criteria for consumers. Testing is mostly spent on integrating all these various components and very little is spent on general UI. I'm a bit wary on Google's approach unless they have some great QA process or are bringing higher quality components to consumers at a lower price point. (Used to work for one of the big consumer networking companies)

wmf 11y ago
Or they're selling this router at a loss by accounting the firmware as $0 so they can give the customer more for their money.

djhworld 11y ago

Google seem to be approaching their marketing from a consumers perspective, capitalising on the common experience of flakey WiFi and shitty tech support telling you that "turning it off, waiting 30 seconds and on again" should "solve" the problem. I'd imagine they've approached the design and development of this product from that angle too.

wtallis 11y ago

There's wide variation in hardware quality, but consumer-oriented stuff is a lot more likely to have thermal issues and crappy power supplies. For software, things are more uniformly bad. Almost every commercial router uses the drivers provided by the chipset vendor, and those are always bad. Even the poster child for open-source drivers (Atheros ath9k 802.11n) still had some nasty lockup bugs this year (eg. https://dev.openwrt.org/browser/trunk/package/kernel/mac80211/patches/379-ath9k-fix-DMA-stop-sequence-for-AR9003.patch?rev=45874 https://dev.openwrt.org/browser/trunk/package/kernel/mac8021...). The closed-source drivers get much less maintenance. And then the router vendors have a team of morons slap together a web interface where all the priorities are on branding, and none on actually exposing the right functionality of the underlying Linux system in a secure manner. And that's if they're even using Linux. OpenWRT makes an extremely powerful argument that the problems is the fragmentation of development instead of a single ongoing centralized project. The jury's still out on where this effort from Google will fall. They've got some people who definitely know what they're doing (eg. Avery Pennarun, though I don't know if he's involved with this). On the other hand, core networking performance and stability clearly isn't what they're emphasizing, and they appear to be using the same ath10k hardware and drivers as everyone else.