In a world where routers are looking more like upside-down spiders than things you'd like to see in your living room, there are only a few devices that could be called "famous." Steve Jobs' AirPort and Eero mesh routers are examples of this. But the winner in this category is the Linksys router model, which is almost 20 years old, thanks to an initially undocumented feature that has become extremely popular with a certain user base. Today we're going to talk about the Linksys WRT54G blue and black wireless router sample. It was this router that showed the world what wireless routers should be capable of.
1988 year
Linksys was founded by two Taiwanese immigrants Jeni and Victor Cao in 1988. According to the 2004 profile on Inc. , the company was conceived as an intermediary between inventors and manufacturers in the Taiwan market, but in the 1990s it started manufacturing equipment, eventually coming to the home networking market and starting to dominate it in the early 2000s.
While not particularly impressive today, the EtherFast router has helped spur Linksys' creation of a new home networking market. And that was BEFORE WiFi started playing an important role.
How black and blue became the unofficial colors of home networking in the early 2000s
Today, most people do not really think about buying a router for their home. Now you can buy a used one for a few dollars or a new one for $ 20.
However, in the late 1990s, absolutely no one knew about routers, this market did not yet exist on the radars of many network equipment manufacturers, because the need for networks was limited to offices. This meant that setting up a router was both extremely expensive and impossible for mere mortals.
This state of affairs helps companies on the periphery, not big enough to fish big, but small enough to see new opportunities. During their first decade of existence, Jeni and Victor Cao have taken advantage of these opportunities to improve the positioning of their networking equipment as markets shift.
In the early 90s, Linksys hardware had to be sold with its own drivers. However, when Windows 95 came along, networking was already built into it. This meant that, all of a sudden, the main obstacle to Linksys gaining market share was gone: there was an increasing demand for its network adapters installed inside desktops and laptops.
Victor assisted in leadership and technology management, while Janie handled sales deals with major retailers such as Best Buy, helping to transform NICs into the mainstream of the technology world.
However, the real chance that made Linksys a leader for many years was Victor's creation of a router that was originally aimed at home users. When long-up modems started to go out of style, an unexpected need arose.
“When broadband internet began to flourish in the late 90s, which had a much higher price tag than a dyl-up, Victor realized that people would want to connect all their home computers to the same line,” says Jeny and Victor's profile on Inc."To do this, they would need a router - a high-tech splitter that allows multiple computers to be connected to one modem."
Again, the companies that Linksys competed with were focused on a market where routers cost almost as much as the computer itself. However, Victor found the perfect niche: a $ 199 router that comes with easy-to-configure software and is easy enough for mere mortals to understand. Plus, it had the unique design that Linksys is famous for - a mix of blue and black plastic with a row of tiny LEDs on the front.
In a review of its cable / DSL router, EtherFast PC Magazine notes that Linksys has done much more than requested.
“The $ 200 price tag would be a breakthrough for a router with two Ethernet ports, but Linksys fit a lot more into this box,” wrote reviewer Craig Ellison. The router, capable of operating at speeds up to 100 megabits, boasts four ports and is theoretically capable of handling hundreds of IP addresses.
It may not have been extremely reliable like its more expensive competitors, but it was reasonably priced for a home device.
The router was an immense success that propelled Linksys to the top of an emerging market. In fact, the only mistake in the router's implementation was the lack of wireless support. However, the big name Linksys meant that once it came out, the new device would have a ready audience that would appreciate its low price and ease of use.
One router became especially popular, but the reasons for this were unexpected for Linksys.
$ 500 million
For that amount, networking equipment giant Cisco acquired Linksys in 2003 . The takeover came at a time when Linksys itself was making half a billion dollars a year, and it was growing rapidly, largely due to the success of its routers. In an interview with NetworkWorld, Victor Cao argued that there are no conflicts between Linksys routers and the Cisco network infrastructure. They solved their problems in different ways, as Cisco will soon see from its own bitter experience.
The WRT54G wasn't just cheap - it could be hacked.
How a random Linksys wireless router feature turned a boring router into a fan-made device
In many ways, the WRT54G router series has become something of the Nintendo Entertainment System of the wireless router world. Appearing around the dawn of the popularity of wireless routers, it has demonstrated much more flexibility than the manufacturer intended. Although she was not the only one, she was in a huge number of homes around the world.
Despite much less fame, its success was comparable to its contemporary Motorola RAZR - it could be found almost everywhere, in homes and small businesses around the world. Despite its dreaded name, the WRT54G was the router that people who needed a wireless router bought.
And chances are high that he will stillused in many places, despite outdated safety standards and extremely ancient appearance. (I recall the story of the Amiga computer , which controlled the heating and ventilation systems of an entire school district.)
However, the reason why the WRT54G series lasted so long, despite using a wireless protocol that was virtually obsolete 12 years ago, may be due to its peculiarity, which was not initially documented. ... This feature persisted, despite all the difficulties caused by the takeover of the company. Coincidentally or not, the WRT54G hid something fundamental to the router's firmware: Linux-based software.
That was the problem - Linksys had to release the source code for its firmware under the GNU General Public License, requiring derivative software to be distributed under the same conditions as the software it was based on.
Andrew Miklas, who helped create the Linux kernel mailing list , said that he personally got in touch with a company employee and made sure that the software was based on Linux ... but eventually the employee stopped communicating with him.
Miklas said his interest in the firmware file was in part driven by a desire to improve Linux support for the then new 802.11g standard that the device supported.
“I know that some wireless device companies were hesitant to release drivers in open source because they were worried that their radio parameters could be changed outside the specification limits. However, if the drivers have already been written, is there any technical obstacle so that they cannot be simply recompiled for Intel hardware and released as binary modules? "
Miklas discovered something interesting, something that shouldn't be in software. This was an oversight on the part of Cisco, which was in for a nasty surprise with a popular product that had only been selling for a few months. Basically, what happened was that one vendor appeared to be using Linux-based firmware in chips supplied by Broadcom and did not report this to Linksys, which transferred the software to Cisco as part of the takeover.
In a 2005 column for the Linux Insider, lawyer Heather Meeker, who specializes in intellectual property and open source software, said that it was rather difficult for Cisco to figure it out on its own:
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Bruce Perens , a venture capitalist, open source activist and former leader of the Debian Linux distribution project, told LinuxDevices that Cisco was not to blame for what happened, but it still faced open source license compliance issues.
“Usually, subcontractors are not very diligent in communicating to clients about their obligations under the GPL,” says Perens. (He also added that despite the offer of help from Cisco, he did not receive an answer.)
However, information about the router with firmware in open source surfaced, and Miklas's post quickly attracted the attention of the fan community. The author of the post on Slashdot was immediately able to see the opening opportunities: "This might be interesting: it will probably be possible to create super cool firmware for an access point with IPsec, native ipv6 support, etc.!"
When Slashdot readers found out about this, they started making demands.
About a month after the Slashdot post was released, the company released its open-source firmware without much enthusiasm .
WRT54G without housing. Thanks to Linux firmware, the device has become a target for both software and hardware hacks.
A world of possibilities opened up to hackers, and third-party developers quickly added features to the original hardware that the manufacturer had never thought of. Basically, it was a home router that could be “hacked” and made to emit a much stronger wireless signal than the FCC allowed, turn it into an SSH server or VPN for your home network. There was an even more striking example - a router could be turned into a robot brain .
It also became the foundation for useful open source software like OpenWrt and Tomato . That is, a whole infrastructure has emerged that made it possible to expand the capabilities of the router much more than was allowed by its manufacturer.
In fact, Cisco, under threat of legal action, was forced to release Linux-based firmware under the GPL license, but was not happy that the device, whose success allowed it to finally get into users' homes, provided them with much more opportunities.
As Lifehacker wrote in 2006, this was the perfect way to turn your $ 60 router into a $ 600 router . That is, theoretically, the success of the device in the market turned into a loss for Cisco.
Therefore, as a result, the company carried out an "upgrade" of the router, which essentially became a downgrade: it eliminated the Linux firmware, replacing it with a proprietary analogue, cutting the amount of RAM and ROM, which made it difficult to replace the firmware with third-party versions. This angered users, and Cisco (probably realizing its failure) released a Linux version of the router called WRT54GL, in which it restored the deleted specifications.
This model can be found on Amazon today and still has a support page on the Linksys site . Despite the fact that its maximum is only 54 megabits / s over the wireless channel, a rather miserable figure compared to modern routers at the same price, it is still on sale.
All the confusion with the GPL caused damage even years after the discovery of a problem with the firmware - as a result, Cisco had to pay the Free Software Foundation. However, this ultimately created the Linksys brand image. Today the company sells a whole line of black and blue routers that retain support for open source firmware. (However, they are much more expensive than the WRT54G.)
“We want this book to expand the audience of the WRT54G platform and the use of embedded devices in general, unlocking the potential that this platform has to offer,” - quoted from the introduction of the 2007 Linksys WRT54G book Ultimate Hacking... The authors of the book played into the hands of the fact that the WRT54G was an embedded system with the ability to hack, at the same time very popular and used for many different purposes, both entertaining and practical. Yes, device hacking has become so widespread that an entire 400-page book has been published on the topic.
To be clear - most people who bought the WRT54G at Best Buy probably didn't care that the firmware was in open source. But this decision created a kind of device cult. Followers of this cult helped maintain a long-term interest in the device among those who were far from hacking.
It was almost unintentional word of mouth. When an ordinary person asked his techie friend which router to buy, he recommended which model it was clear to him.
A 2016 article on Ars Technica reported that the router was still generating millions of dollars a year for Linksys, which was then sold to Belkin. Despite the fact that the model was not nearly as powerful as its more expensive counterparts, the WRT54GL (yes, the version with Linux) retained its audience in the second decade, because it was perceived as extremely reliable and easy to use.
“We keep making it because people keep buying it,” said product manager Vince LaDuca at the time, who said the router continues to sell because parts for it continue to be produced.
Above, I said that the WRT54G in many ways has become an analogue of the Nintendo Entertainment System for wireless routers. And I think this is especially true in the context of his rather impressive afterlife, like the NES. Despite its age and unsuitable appearance for the living room, it sold well for many years after its "expiration date", in no small part due to the use of open drivers.
If your user base asks you to save something, then you should listen to it.
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