Re: [nznog] openwrt capable routers for NZ?

What I found really astounding about your email - (and of many others besides) - is *my first focus* is on reliability. This kind of device is mission critical. It MUST stay up. Always. And never crash. And doing that right, is really, really, hard. (once you get to a few 9s, life gets easier) https://plus.google.com/u/0/107942175615993706558/posts/TVX3o84jjmb It took us 3 years to get to where we had a box that did not dissassociate on a whim, that took enormous loads and stayed up, and the current recordholder for uptime is 140 days or so. https://lists.bufferbloat.net/pipermail/cerowrt-devel/2015-March/004193.html (sorry about the bad cert) Most of the lower uptimes reported by my userbase are due merely to losing power, or some reconfiguration. I have been able to crash most other devices (ISP supplied or not) inside of a few hours of stress testing. (and all the work on cero is now in openwrt chaos calmer. (and tons more besides, the openwrt people really outdid themselves with barrier breaker) I am really happy with their stability so far, but we are about to go break some things with make-wifi-fast ) On Mon, Mar 9, 2015 at 4:04 PM, Ray Taylor wrote:

I understand as its generic firmware, I assume there will be many different compatible hardware options.

Although it is default (generic) firmware, your life becomes a lot easier if you just pick one or three devices that meet your needs, and debug the heck out of them before you ship. It is really impossible to test dozens or hundreds of semi-compatible devices. And thus, you end up with nzwrt, as a commonly supported brand on X number of devices... Sure, try as many as you want - try getting stuff directly from china off of alibaba, for example, but consult with the openwrt folk as to what devices you should use to best meet your country's needs.

The big thing though is the voip needs to be capable which may reduce your compatibility list.

I have to admit that onboard voip has not been on my radar at all. A lot of that stuff used to be (back when I still paid attention to voip in my asterisk days), very binary blob, very proprietary. Maybe with the rise of FON that ended, but I don't know. adding in a FON guy.

The market in NZ has dramatically changed with computer stores selling less and less routers, and the home users just using the router issued free from their ISP.

just using the *crappy* router issued free from their ISP. There, fixed that for you. I agree that the aftermarket router biz is in decline, and it's in decline for a variety of reasons, notably, firmware that is often worse than the ISPs, big promises not kept, and general unreliability, and low uptake of 802.11ac clients. I was saddened to find every new home router I tested last month wouldn't even let you turn off nat nor had any routing protocols. I would like it if more routers (both home and ISP-supplied) let you route rather than bridge everything. (which is why babeld - the current default ietf homenet routing protocol) is standard in cerowrt and homewrt.

And to make it work for an ISP in a fibre world, it needs to have a built in voip ATA

I was under the impression that voip ATA was only needed by 50% or so of the marketplace. Me, I long ago switched to skype, and now, webrtc.

Software: - WAN/LAN bridge mode - uPNP

PCP also

- IPv4 / IPv6 - Programmable 0.0.0.0/0 or gateway address when lan + wan in bridge mode - voip must work when in bridge mode. Have had problems with zyxel and others having no gateway address breaking voip when in bridge mode

yep. Getting the NAT right for voip can be a pita. Getting prioritization to work right is a solved problem with fq_codel, tho. Voip calls just cut through other traffic like butter.

- router must be accessible from behind another nat gateway via a port forward.

Yes, was shocked to see nat-only routers. In the case of the cable industry they are not providing devices with real IPs by default, and you have to call them to get them to bridge it for you. so you end up double-natted, just to start with. The future I wanted to live in had a standard jack in the wall that you plugged your own bought-at-the-store gear into. I wanted to keep competition in the marketplace. Sigh.

Enabling WAN admin access doesn’t always make this work with many routers

Remote access is how I maintain my family and several friends routers.

Hardware: - Price point of $40-$50 so we can issue them free with service

wholesale cost qty 1000? 100? 10? This would include the fiber adaptor itself?

- A higher priced, higher speed option would be good for fibre based services

I can certainly see a basic wireless-n version and an -ac version.

- 3dbi antenna, 18db tx power - 802.11n 2.4ghz option. We don’t see the need for ac for at least 3 years

Not clear to me what you are saying here. In big cities at least, 2.4ghz is pretty saturated so I generally recomend a dual radio router.

There was recently a project between geekzone and telecom to build a "standard router for NZ" which was designed to be the perfect one with all the features that the GZ community wanted, could be issued for free by telecom and was capable of being used for DSL and fibre.

Well, what got me on this email list is jed laundry's talk thursday night at nznog on his conception of creating "NZWRT" to replace the residential gateways now being supplied. *I like very much an entire country tossing the default firmware on their residental gateways*, and wouldn't mind replacing the fiber converters too... but the only way I've ever been able to figure out how to pay for continuous updates (fixes for, example, openssl, and other hacks) ... is for the ISP devices to be rented to the customer, and a portion of that revenue assigned to the ongoing maintenance and support teams. At these low hardware costs, the real cost of software development and maintenance starts to outweigh the cost of the hardware. And the real costs of security breaches like dnschanger and friends, very, very high. IF NZ can get together on standardizing a few hardware platforms for custom firmware to meet NZ's needs, then you can amoritize that, most of this hardware can last for 7-10 years or more in the field, but will always be in dire need of updates from day #1. My colleague, Jim Gettys, has been focusing on the security issues in home routers for a few years now. Here he is at Berkman Center, with Bruce Schneir: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ykhFDyPfxzE Be afraid. Be very afraid... Happily, openwrt has now got features like signed packages, and better forms of updating, but it still will take effort to do right, and roll out new features and bugfixes to userbases counted in the 10s or 100s of thousands.

They got as far as taking bids for the project from companies like huawei and the likes.

That was the first wrong move.

Most of the features that the GZ community were proposing I found to be useless as an isp supplied router, but it would be worth looking at the feature list.

Well, if you can find it and post here... archive.org might have it....

I think a bit of googling might be needed to get to the feature voting page in the forums - it may have been deleted.

Ray Taylor Taylor Communications ray(a)ruralkiwi.com

Ph 021-483-280 Network status 06-929-9082

-----Original Message----- From: Dave Taht [mailto:dave.taht(a)gmail.com] Sent: Tuesday, 10 March 2015 11:45 a.m. To: Ray Taylor Subject: Re: [nznog] openwrt capable routers for NZ?

always helpful to have that list. And have that list discussed publicly.

This is the only public talk I have given about wifi... see second half.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wksh2DPHCDI

On Mon, Mar 9, 2015 at 3:43 PM, Ray Taylor wrote:

...

Im keen to take part Wouldn’t know anything about designing firmware other than the list of features that I need.

Ray Taylor Taylor Communications ray(a)ruralkiwi.com

Ph 021-483-280 Network status 06-929-9082

-----Original Message----- From: nznog-bounces(a)list.waikato.ac.nz [mailto:nznog-bounces(a)list.waikato.ac.nz] On Behalf Of Dave Taht Sent: Tuesday, 10 March 2015 11:14 a.m. To: Jed Laundry Cc: NZNOG(a)list.waikato.ac.nz Subject: Re: [nznog] openwrt capable routers for NZ?

I see this thread has kind of died... I am looking for people willing to participate in the upcoming make-wifi-fast project. Along the way, we'll probably build a pretty good firmware for general use on some off-the-shelves piece of hardware, and it would be good to be able to test with your upcoming fiber deployment(s) as well as on the WISP sides of things.

Please let me and jim gettys know if you are interested in helping out on this.

-- Dave Täht Let's make wifi fast, less jittery and reliable again!

https://plus.google.com/u/0/107942175615993706558/posts/TVX3o84jjmb _______________________________________________ NZNOG mailing list NZNOG(a)list.waikato.ac.nz http://list.waikato.ac.nz/mailman/listinfo/nznog

-- Dave Täht Let's make wifi fast, less jittery and reliable again!

https://plus.google.com/u/0/107942175615993706558/posts/TVX3o84jjmb

-- Dave Täht Let's make wifi fast, less jittery and reliable again! https://plus.google.com/u/0/107942175615993706558/posts/TVX3o84jjmb