[Battlemesh] Open Router Alternatives (Was: Chilling effect - Lockdown (FCC/EU))

[Ferry Huberts]

On 18/02/16 11:43, Linus Lüssing wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 18, 2016 at 10:44:34AM +0100, Bastian Bittorf wrote:
>> generally speaking we need an OpenHardware design
>> for indoor 2.4/5GHz and outdoor 2.4 and outdoor 5GHz
>> with "standard" antenna connectors (RP-SMA/N)
>
> Was posted on the Freifunk WLANware mailinglist some months ago,
> a promising crowd-funded, open router:
>


If you truly want to do such a project for a low cost router,
your best bet would be to source the hardware from one of the 
manufacturers, say TP-Link.

Yes, they now have shut the door on firmware flashing, but that is only 
to comply with the FCC because they don't want to lose the US market.

If you only source the hardware from them, you can ensure that there 
will not be any such limitations.

You can then put OpenWRT on it, put your project somewhere like GitHub 
and sell into 'normal' markets.

Low cost hardware, open firmware.
Everyone wins.


I might even be interested into starting a company doing just that, need 
to put a bit of thought into that.
Anyone else interested?
It might work brilliantly if some big names were involved in that ;-)


> https://omnia.turris.cz/en/
>
>> so first there is an design needed and so we need
>> to crowdfound the developement of the open design
>> and the approval (FCC and EU).
>
> For the Omnia Turris, no FCC/ETSI approval needed: The board
> itself has no radios but miniPCIe slots instead :).
>
>
> Unfortunately, they are more expensive of course... with two
> miniPCIe radio cards and a case they would cost about 150 USD.
>
> So "economically speaking", you can build maybe only five
> to seven times smaller community mesh networks as compared to
> ~20 USD routers.
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-- 
Ferry Huberts