Jan 18, 2021 07:00:00

Why are 'wireless LAN routers' about 15 years ago still on sale?

by

Kyle Adams

The network environment of homes in Japan has been increasing in speed and quality in the last few years, with the advent of 10Gbps line plans and the increase in wireless LAN routers that support ' Wi-Fi 6 '. Nevertheless, there is a 'wireless LAN router' that was released in 2005 and continues to be sold until the time of writing the article, said Arnie Smith , editor of the overseas news site ' Tadium '.

WRT54G History: The Router That Accidentally Went Open Source
https://tedium.co/2021/01/13/linksys-wrt54g-router-history/

Nowadays, routers can be easily obtained from home electronics mass retailers, but in the 1990s they were extremely expensive devices and were out of reach of the general public. In addition, broadband lines, which began to spread to ordinary households in the latter half of the 1990s, were capable of high-speed communication, but their usage fees were higher than conventional dial-up lines.

From the situation surrounding such a network at that time, Linksys, which was established in 1988, was the first to detect the demand for 'connecting multiple computers to one line' in small businesses and homes. Linksys dominates the network equipment market by selling a router that can be easily set up even if you are not a network expert at a low price of $ 199 (about 14,300 yen at the exchange rate at that time). Ultimately, Linksys was acquired by network equipment giant Cisco in 2003 for $ 500 million.

The Linksys wireless LAN router '

WRT54G ' series was synonymous with wireless LAN routers at the time, and the first model in the series, the 'WRT54GL', was on sale at the time of article creation. The WRT54G series has become such a long-lived product because of 'undocumented features' that were overlooked in the turmoil of the Linksys acquisition. It was that the firmware was Linux-based.

Since the Linux license is ' GNU GPL ', the source code of the WRT54G firmware that uses Linux also needs to be released. Linux kernel developer Andrew Micuras confirmed to Linksys employees that the WRT54G's firmware was Linux-based and requested that the source code be released, but said he did not respond. Micuras himself analyzed the WRT54G firmware and published the source code on the Linux mailing list. The source code for the firmware was released in the same year that Cisco acquired Linksys.

Cisco was unable to discover this issue during the acquisition of Linksys because of the lack of 'Linux-based' information in the firmware supply chain. The firmware was originally developed by Broadcom, which supplied chips to Linksys, outsourced to an overseas contractor, but both Broadcom, which outsourced the development, and Linksys, which received the chip, used Linux for the firmware. He didn't know he was there.

M & A experts also point out that 'it is extremely difficult for Cisco to detect this problem in advance.'

Cisco officially released the source code after the issue was reported by foreign media. As a result, volunteers added functions such as SSH server and VPN to the WRT54G one after another. After the source code was released, Cisco once rewrote all the WRT54G firmware with proprietary code, but in response to the backlash from the community, the firmware released the Linux-based router 'WRT54GL'. The WRT54GL has long been a favorite of developers and has led to the development of open source operating systems for network devices such as OpenWrt and Tomato .

The WRT54GL was released in 2005, but as of 2016, it was said that Linksys was making hundreds of millions of yen annually. Linksys product manager Vince La Duca commented on why Linksys, which became

Belkin 's subsidiary from Cisco in 2013, will continue to sell the WRT54GL at the time of writing, 'because people continue to buy the WRT54GL.' I will.

At the time of writing the article, WRT54GL is sold at Amazon.co.jp for 33,136 yen including tax.

Amazon.co.jp: Wless AccessPoint Router / 54Mpbs 4xE + FNet: Home Appliances / Camera