If its success has kept uncountable, "segmented" garbage devices from ever entering the market, I'd say WRT has been even better for the consumers than you think.

I think you both agree.

Unfortunately what is good for consumers in this case is bad for companies, because it reduces long term sales.

I'd think there must be another reason. Almost anything a corporation does is optimizing for the next quarter. Sales 2 years in the future are a problem for the next set of CxO's

Some candidate reasons: Open source is still to different and hence risky. Or maybe arrogance and not invented here syndrome.

Thanks for connecting those dots for me.

Certainly that's a good thing though. Conserving resources and discouraging needless waste of perfectly functional products is a good thing.

I would continue to buy their newer routers if they have open firmware a la WRT54G. New wifi standards came out, had to install routers for friends and family, and WRT54G itself kind of died after 3 or 4 years... (I bought a second one, but by then N standard was up and running, so 3rd was not Linksys)

But think of the economies of scale and the $ saved in terms of RnD and marketing

Cisco didn't want a threat to their lucrative enterprise market.

Imagine if they kept pumping out updated hardware supporting DD-WRT over the years, and eventually captured 80+% of the home networking market. Now consider that, during that time, a generation of future networking engineers cut their teeth on hi-po Linksys home routers, giving Linksys a segue into the lucrative enterprise market as this generation of people started gaining influence.

This ended up being one of magical events that could have been the turning point for a small, unknown company to take on a giant, and win. Instead, the opportunity was squished through a smart acquisition by Cisco.

while i understand your argument, enterprise/ISP routers have completely different functionality then home devices. most people in the network engineering field cut their teeth on enterprise gear in lower level positions.

for instance, home routers do data and control plane processing on a single CPU with no or very little NPU involved, while enterprise gear has this functionality.

not to mention the large array of technologies that are not even usable in small scale networks like VXLAN, BGP, IPVPN etc..

Actually I have found a use for VXLAN in my home network, when I was trying to set up a mesh and was finding that 802.11s support was poor and that WDS was creating annoying switching loops despite STP. So I just set up wireless links between routers, use OSPF to determine routes, set appropriate weights to prefer the 5ghz band (which periodically goes down because of DFS but otherwise gives higher throughput), and use VXLAN to create the logical network I want. It has worked extremely well for several months now and my wife is happy to not have cables going all over our house. There are probably "better" ways to do this but honestly, it works, it is flexible, and it is straightforward to extend to more routers if needed.

The Linksys routers where not really competing in that corporate market though.

Some Small Business may have used Linksys but they would not have been buying cisco kit in most cases.

I'm still using one WRT54GL 1.0 in rural area.

Because it just works and refuse do die.

That’s a terrible product to sell in today’s world

Care to explain why a product that does what it's supposed to is terrible to sell in today's world?

I believe it was a sardonic expression on bucking the inexorable trend towards consumerism and recurring-purchase/subscriptions

For me, it’s primarily because this device has stood still while faster, cheaper, more powerful devices with lower power consumption and more fully open-source firmwares have entered the marketplace.

The WRT54GL doesn’t have a fully open firmware—the WiFi remains closed—and has so little RAM and flash that OpenWRT, that started with the WRT54G, no longer supports it. DD-WRT is creeping in the same direction.

IPv6 support is more off than on. It’s never going to support DoT, WPA3, or other modern security measures. Most of the world is urbanized, and in an urban setting it’s a bit rude to use 54 Mbps 802.11g on the 2.4 GHz channels.

If you’re using it for an internal network on a farm, it’s fine, but if you’re in today’s world then you need to support today’s protocols.

How is it rude? The 2.4 GHz channel is open for all to use as they please as long as they comply with power limits.

I live in a residential neighbourhood, my router has both 5 GHz ac and 2.4 GHz. I run it in 2.4 GHz 802.11n mode.

In terms of raw data rate, each byte of data on 802.11g takes the airtime of about 3 bytes on 802.11n. Since 2.4 GHz WiFi penetrates obstacles so well, that’s airtime that you’re excluding from up to several nearby homes if you generate traffic on 802.11g.

I've been on 'n' mode for awhile, but even if I was only 'g' why should I care considering there are neighbors that use 40 Hz channels on the 2.4 band? Or neighbors that set their channel to other than 1,6,11?

Arguably worse!

Correct, you don’t need to care. But the commons only needs to be a tragedy if you let it be a tragedy.

Just because others behave badly or worse doesn’t give you the moral right to do badly.

We don’t need to be perfect. If everybody did as politely as we could, and did what we could to help others behave as politely as they could, then I think everybody would be better off. Well, “polite” is not quite a direct translation of the concept I have in mind… I’m not sure how to communicate it in English.

To be honest, you're using a small fraction of the available wireless networking bandwidth available in 2020.

54Mbps vs 600Mbps for just 2.4Ghz, and using 5Ghz gets you to over 1Gbps.

Not accounting for real world losses/overhead, but that would hold true for the WRT54G.

Products need to fail or become undesirable to use after 3 years so you buy a new one.

This one works 14 years without issue.

Except that 2 times was crashed and then start with blank settings.

Thus making the supplier $60 over 14 years.

Sell a whizzy router with go fast blue LEDs for $150 that dies after 3 years and you make $750 in 15 years.

Advertise it with some “value add” MITM dns hijacking by default and you can even get a recurrent revenue stream on top of it. Bundle it as “Internet security” and you can charge bothe the customer and the advertiser.

Actually much more than $60...

I've purchase other Linksys stuff and few mine friends bought new routers because of mine recommendation.

But that was before they switch to VxWorks OS. Once they switch i didn't recommend them anymore.

True dat.

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