While we count on Wi-Fi more than ever to be entertained, productive, and stay connected, we’re streaming and sharing in new ways our old routers were never built to handle. So today, with our partner TP-LINK, we’re launching OnHub, a different kind of router for a new way to Wi-Fi. Instead of headaches and spotty connections, OnHub gives you Wi-Fi that’s fast, secure, and easy to use.
Over the years, I’ve had a lot of routers, and all of them were bad products. No ifs and buts. They had connection problems, terrible user interfaces, they were ugly, and a pain to use. Once I finally had enough, I decided to splurge and get an Apple AirPort Extreme. I can assure you – it’s one of the best purchases I’ve ever made. Great UI, zero problems, it looks nice, and it always works.
This new Google product is effectively Google’s AirPort Extreme, and as such, I’m pretty sure this will be a great product too. Sure, like the AirPort Extreme, it’s a lot more expensive than the crappy €35 routers you can buy, but they’re totally worth it.
There’s also quite a beefy computer in there, and I wonder if you could get to it and do cool stuff with it.
Asus routers are pretty good, for example: https://www.asus.com/Networking/RTAC68U/
But I’m not sure why are they so hard to update? Even with open firmware like DD-WRT and the like, in order to update them one has to flash the image. Why can’t they offer over the air update like most modern computers do?
Edited 2015-08-18 22:41 UTC
Huh? I have the RTAC68U and it does OTA updates just fine.
Really? I tried to figure how to do it with DD-WRT, but the only proposed way was to flash the whole image, which basically wipes everything. I wouldn’t mind having some easy way to do something in the style of
apt-get update && apt-get dist-uptrade
or whatever other method that would simply pull in incremental updates without wiping out the whole system.
Edited 2015-08-19 04:08 UTC
Oh sorry, I thought you meant with any firmware. I just run the stock Asus. Used to run DD-WRT but I don’t see the need for it anymore
You mean stock Asus firmware supports incremental updates? That’s interesting, then I wonder why DD-WRT doesn’t. I never used stock firmware, so I had no idea.
DD-WRT has never supported incremental updates. It’s one of the reasons I gave up on it.
Are there any better distros which do?
Wow. TP-LINK. There’s a high quality brand I trust. Do Google plan to diversify with further high quality partners such as Startech, too?
Don’t know if you’re being sarcastic or serious (or seriously sarcastic?), but I got myself a TP-Link router – model name resembles a password, so I can’t remember – and have been pretty happy with it so far. I’ve had zero coverage issues, zero connectivity or transfer issues, and (for my needs) zero speed issues. Best of all, it’s fully compatible with OpenWRT/Gargoyle. Not saying it’s better than the competition out there, but it’s definitely no worse. At first I was a bit hesitant since it wasn’t a brand I’d heard much of, but it’s turned out to be one of the more reliable routers I’ve owned.
…and now that I’ve jinxed it, I expect to get disconnected as soon as I submit this post.
Yeah, that’s been my experience too… they’re not as well-known a brand as some, but I’ve owned quite a few networking devices (routers, wi-fi adapters) and had no problems with any of them. No idea what the previous poster was fussing about…
It depends on what you get. TP-Link’s cheaper gear is notorious for having to be rebooted weekly, but their higher end stuff is solid. I’ve had both ends of the spectrum and experienced it as well. Sometimes a newer firmware release fixes issues, and most of their routers are fully Open/DD-WRT compatible, so there’s that.
Unfortunately their cheaper switches are not firmware upgradeable, and I have one of their TL-SG1005D switches that I have to power cycle every few days or I lose connectivity.
TP-Link makes surprisingly great router hardware, and AFIK like most vendors it all just runs Linux underneath. Their stock firmware UI is merely OK (IMO, better than some “reputable” brands), but if you’re buying for OpenWRT because you figure all vendor firmware will be terrible in one way or another, they’re a great choice.
I spent part of the summer deploying instrumented routers in volunteer households for a research project collecting anonymized usage statistics. The whole thing is built on top of a fleet of TL-WDR3600 running OpenWRT and some in-house software. It’s taught me to appreciate OpenWRT and despise most CPE (Sagemcom and Ubee units in particular) even more than I did before, Apple’s “You have to use this funky little proprietary program to configure the router, because a web interface, like every other piece of consumer networking equipment, would be too simple” included. It’s getting a little weird how many comments we’ve had about improved signal from our $60 devices over $200 models.
On the Google OnHub front, I have trouble imagining our friendly neigborhood megacorp-whose-only-meaningful-income-stream-is-advertising resisting the temptation to sprunje through your traffic for marketing purposes, especially since it clearly requires you let it couple to a google account for configuration. Here’s the policy: https://support.google.com/onhub/answer/6279845
Edited 2015-08-19 00:25 UTC
Is there any gigabit router from TP-Link with 802.11ac that can run OpenWRT?
Yes, TP-Link Archer C7/WDR7500
http://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/tp-link/tl-wdr7500
Be sure to not get the 1.x revision, OpenWrt supports 5 GHz Wifi only on 2.x and newer.
Thanks! Does it handle the load well? What I like about Asus is that they use dual core CPUs in their recent routers.
By the way, do you mean the 3 or 6 antenna one?
Edited 2015-08-19 19:35 UTC
The 6 antenna one is China only.
If you don’t live in China, you can only buy the 3 antenna version easily.
Note that in some routers the dual cores are not SMP so the second core may not be possible to use with Linux.
First thing I thought when I saw the announcement was “google account is needed” and this https://support.google.com/onhub/answer/6246481?hl=en
“Sign into your Google Account”
“The Google On companion app is needed to set up your OnHub and access its features.”
So that is indeed brilliant “security” and of course you buy a 200$ router which you can’t access without a google app and account. Yep you really own the device.
By the way @Thom, if you only bought 35$ worth of routers up to now, sorry but there have always been respectable WiFi routers in the market, TP-LINK had many for example. A clear example of you get what you paid for.
I guess only time will tell how much of your internet activity it shares with ‘home’.
Personally, I think that this announcement/release could not have come at a worse time given the current levels of interest in privacy following the launch(damp squib more like) of Windows 10.
Google(or whatever they are called today) should come out and make it clear what data is shared with the Chocolate Factory.
I’d even go further than this and make it mandatory to have this declaration in words that even non lawyers can easily understand.
Apple (love or hate them) have said that any data they get from users will not be sold to 3rd parties. That has IMHO set the bar. Who will jump over it and raise it up a few notches?
Google? Nah, their whole business model seems to be built upon knowing everything there is to know about us but there is an opportunity for others to come clean about what they do with the data they get on us poor plebs who use their kit/products.
Ouch. Even Apple’s not that bad. You need their Airport Utility, but no account sign ins required.
TP-Link always makes me think of Beavis….
“I am cranfordio!”
Edited 2015-08-19 02:59 UTC
I never trusted anything coming from TP-LINK before, but 1.5-2 years ago I was looking for a wireless router which could also take a usb mobile internet stick, and I found a TP-LINK, which was cheap enough that I went and bought it to see how it performs. I might have been lucky, but I had no problems with it whatsoever, I’m still using it. However, I have to point out, that this ‘success story’ is also what is wrong with cheapo routers, i.e., it’s pure lottery where you never know what you’ll get. So, even if this worked out for me, it still didn’t change my general opinion about cheap crap routers.
One more vote for TP-LINK here. Went to use their products after (sometimes deep) frustration with D-Link, Linksys and Trendnet a couple of years ago. Never looked back.
I’m not sure Google is a company I can trust to not collect and use my router data for advertising purposes. In fact, I can see this as a way to monitor online activity through all devices and platforms (Apple TV, X-Box, Kindle, etc.) to learn more about the user/household.
Sorry for being pessimistic about what could be a great product but I have been burned too many times.
I’m with you on that 100%, but the moment it’s revealed these things can be firmware flashed to OpenWRT, I’m grabbing one. The hardware alone is phenomenal, and it looks great compared to any router I’ve ever seen before.
Interestingly, on their info page it appears they ripped off Apple’s Mac Pro cooling scheme; I wonder if they will end up being sued over that?
It’d be great if it could work with OpenWRT, but I have the sneaking suspicion there’ll be some closed source component contained within it. I agree that it looks better then most routers out there. Apple and Ubiquiti solutions are bland yuppie white, while everything else either looks like a table-top walkie-talkie or some kind of bug with antennas and legs protruding from all over. Heck, last time I saw some of D-Link’s new router designs, I almost rolled up a magazine wanting to smack the thing.
Funny you mention that – it was the first thought that went through my mind.
Mostly agree. The one exception where they haven’t always worked is connecting USB hard drives for file sharing. There seems to be some sort of voodoo magic involved there, because it’ll work sometimes and other times it will just fail utterly, with every Airport and every USB hard drive I’ve ever tried.
Same problems on my high end Asus router. Bought it because of the supposed speed sharing USB3 drives but the sharing has never been reliable. This seems to be some kind of harder task than it should be.
Now, see, there’s your problem. It’s a router. Let it route.
When you start adding things like file storage, it’s no longer a router, it’s a gateway server. Put your file storage INSIDE your network, not on the edge. Same goes for torrent clients, and mail daemons, and web servers and anything else you can think of.
If you can’t explicitly white-list services to be reached from the outside, perhaps you should reconsider whether that service needs to be exposed.
Seriously, $200 for a wlan ap that doesnot/cannot have usb 3G/4G modem for internet connectivity?
Edited 2015-08-19 08:38 UTC
But I have a FritzBox, its pretty solid, even runs my internal phone network. If I lived in Germany I could manage my power sockets as well.
It was very expensive. £250. That said it does VDSL on board without the need for another device. It has AC, Gigabit and USB 3.0.
My best value buy is £6 Asus ADSL G router, from back in the day when they were good. It is perfect for my parents, as they just need a box they switch on and stays up. I manage the box for them.
LOL! Working UI that requires you to install a f u c k ing binary blob on your machine to do the tiniest configuration. To me that’s the lowest imaginable standard for configuring a router.
Edited 2015-08-19 14:42 UTC
I had similar complaints unless I bought lower end business stuff, and then I bought a WRT54GL and flashed it with Tomato firmware.
I’ve got a different router now, but third-party router firmware like DD-WRT and the Tomato derivatives are where it’s at.
It appears to run some kind of ChromeOS derivative (Brillo?). If other ChromeOS devices are any indication, you will be able to access the package manager and even replace the operating system if you want.
With other operating systems though you’ll possibly lose Bluetooth Smart Ready, Weave, or 802.15.4 support.
I was an early adopter of DD-WRT and then TomatoUSB and finally ASUS Merlin firmware on various different hardware devices. They were all very good at adding features such as VPN, but never quite had great signal reliability. I recently switched to using Ubiquiti wireless APs and could not be happier. They are enterprise level access points and they are available for ~ $69. Since then I’ve never been dropped off my wifi, I’ve got consistent 60+MBps connection speeds on my phone and laptop, and my streaming is much smoother.
Women Attraction Factor – My wife will never ever allow place it prominent anywhere visible.
I’d stay with my FritzBox in the cave and a small repeater to extend distance.
How do you manage to buy so many bad routers? I’ve bought zillions of routers too, TP-Link, ASUS, Cisco, Juniper, MikroTik, Ubiquiti, Thomson, VyOS, pfSense, etc, etc. They aren’t some kind of mystery, you pretty much know the capabilities before you purchase. Don’t think I’ve ever been surprised or disappointed because I did my research first.