[Freedombox-discuss] FreedomBox as a home router to replace Cisco/Linksys

[Sean Alexandre]

On Tue, 3 Jul 2012 14:45:10 -0500
Brian Drake <Brian at drakewolf.net> wrote:

> I've been of the opinion that we should reach out to one of these arm
> manufacturers and have them do a custom box for us rather than trying
> to adapt to the generic developer kits like the dreamplug and
> guruservers. Let them sell it as a development kit if they want but
> we specify the ports and specs on the board.
> 
> This increases the per-box cost a bit but eliminates ports that would
> be absolutely useless to us which could also save money.  No need for
> audio, HDMI etc.
> 
> 4/5 (POE) network ports (standard router config)
> 4? usb ports (charge point & wired data transfer for cell/mobile
> devices) 1 SD slot
> 2 Wifi antennas/ radios
> JTAG
> Battery built in for 'brownout' situations
> 
> If the team can define the ports we want and come to an agreement I'd
> be happy to have conversations with a few manufacturers about
> pricing/volume sales.  There is another thread regarding the chips
> and the ID's that are stored and we could examine those as part of
> this kind of request.


I like that idea. As a consumer, I'd choose a FreedomBox that can take
the place of my home router over a special purpose device I attach to
my existing router. I'd want something with the same kind of ports I get
today in a home router: one for the WAN, and then 4 for the LAN.

That said, I can understand why the Dream Plug was chosen. It's
available now. It's inexpensive. Has wireless. Has two NICs: one for a
WAN, one for a LAN. There's only the one LAN port, but a user could
plug a simple $15 switch into it to get more ports.

Longer term there will no doubt be other options, as new hardware
becomes available.

For now, it seems the best bet for FreedomBox is to just get a good
solid first release out. (By solid I mean stable and does some one
or two useful things, versus lots of features.) It would be based on
Debian, and so could be ported to other platforms as they become
available. And, new services and features could be added in follow on
releases.

Meanwhile in parallel someone such as yourself and/or others could be
exploring this direct route to better hardware. Sounds great to me,
although I have to say I don't know much about the hardware procurement
process.