Tell HN: I want a managed router for my house
A WiFi router connected to the 'net is both the riskiest and most important piece of my house's network security. Does my firmware have an exploitable bug? Is my firewall properly configured? I'm a developer, and I'm not entirely certain that my own routers are configured properly. What are my parents supposed to do? Router manufacturers rarely update firmware to fix bugs or provide additional functionality, and there have been many cases where even publicly available security issues went un-resolved. Must I buy a new router every few months?
More and more devices are competing for limited bandwidth. I had to do a bunch of Googling to find a script to give a low QOS to backblaze.com traffic. Had I not done this, initial back-up of my desktop computer would have taken WEEKS longer. Grandma doesn't want to understand iptables. When a router was used so two computers could be used to browse the web, little configuration was required. But now...
Here's what I want....A router where maintenance, configuration, and continuous security are not afterthoughts. I'm imagining a WiFi router that looks pretty much like any other consumer-grade router except that, instead of providing a crappy web interface for configuration, it phones "home" to StartupX's router management service. I go to startupx.com and use the nice, helpful configuration utilities to tell my router what services it ought to be providing. And, by service, I don't mean "forward UDP/TCP to port X locally" -- I mean "I use Skype from my desktop computer, so make it fast please." Oh, and I use backblaze, so make it fast as long as it doesn't hinder anything else. And, help me pick the right kinds of wireless security for the devices in my house. Could the router also have a continuously-updated active firewall? Could I teach it which device is my Droid just by pulling up a special web site when commanded by the management site? Oh, and I use BitTorrent.....can you make sure I don't screw that up royally?
From a touchy-feely standpoint, I want to be confident that I'm not exposing myself to security risks I'm unaware of. And, I just want this problem to go away. I'm willing to pay not only for the device, but I'll pay per month for management, updates, and support.
I did some brief Googling and couldn't find anything like this for consumers. Various ISPs are selling managed routers for businesses, but nobody is in the consumer space. Am I off my rocker? After spending a few hours over the holidays updating the routers in my house, I started thinking about alternatives. I'm posting this here because this is something I want to buy, but it's not a business that I think I'm well-suited to start.
Edited shortly after initial posting.
21 comments
[ 141 ms ] story [ 653 ms ] threadThere is untangle.com also, they may have something closer to what you are looking for.
The distros are nice, but my relatives aren't going to get past the homepage. The product I want isn't for me so much as for the people whose routers I've set-up/managed over the years.
http://www.myopenrouter.com/
The Netgear WNR3500L with DD-WRT firmware is as close as you're going to get for a reasonable price (about $100 USD).
Edit: The feature list for DD-WRT is here:
http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/What_is_DD-WRT%3F#Featu...
The innovation isn't in features, it's that you don't have to work in IT to have enough knowledge to configure it. Home networking is not a problem most people want to think about. They just want it to work.
We have a "dual fuel" HVAC system. It switches between electric and gas for heat depending on the outside temperature (electrical heat is very efficient in fall/winter given our relative fuel costs). The HVAC guys had all sorts of suggestions on how to tweak out additional savings by adjusting various parameters (temp for fuel cross-over, +/- range allowed in home, etc.) and were very excited about the possibilities. I just wanted the control unit to figure out what some reasonable settings were and to monitor performance.
We'll do smaller numbers if a customer really wants it but the price per month of any number of units 10 and under is $950/month. (So we bill for 10, even if they only use 2)
The shocking truth we discovered about this market is that it doesn't matter if its one location or a thousand, one computer or 10k, each customer requires about the same amount of work on a monthly basis. If you control the router, you are the defacto first-call for any trouble in the office/home. They've outsourced their IT, and its you.
For the curious, we deploy a custom baked read-only Centos distro on compact flash running on Soekris boards. When more oomf is needed, we move up to lanners. Wireless radios are 'CM9" A/B/G atheros.
If you want to make a go of it, you can fully kit out at http://www.netgate.com (1)
Its not really a "startup" in our classical HN definition as it scales most linearly and only works as well as your best engineer, but I'd be happy to answer any questions from people who are interested in working this type of angle, or even doing some development for your own particular flavor. (2)
(1) I don't have any affiliation with netgate beyond getting to know the guys down there and really appreciating all they did to help us get going.
(2) I've been kicking around the idea of a home version coupled with a distributed VNC powered helpdesk for several years now but haven't found the right group of people/motivations to make a go of it yet. The numbers are hard (very), but the market would be limitless.
buy "Secured home router"
plug in cables
turn on
launch web browser
captive portal configuration screen
configuration goes through common steps, advanced options buttons for those who know what they're doing, one of which is an option for 1 month free software upgrade/virus/malware/firewall administration, 3/6/9/12 month subscription rates and sign-up process.
Actual functionality is: firewall provides reasonable QoS parameters for a shared internet connection and prioritizing traffic in a manner that benefits user-interactive applications (HTTP(S) over p2p, etc.), dns blackhole for known malicious domain names, updating firewall rules for blocking known bad IPs (stolen abandoned blocks, etc.), captive portal style page hijacking for sites known for malicious content (with an ignore this warning button), software updates, configuration backup to a central server.
The main issue I can think of is that the end user wants to feel like they're completely uninhibited on the internet. The problem is that to protect against most real threats, there's trade-offs and you'll have a 5-10% error rate for blocking traffic the user really wanted. This means that support would be a difficult cost to overcome, but I think a url on the system that resolves locally to the router to provide a "what problem are you having yes/no" style troubleshooter could help prevent a large number of complicated call ins.
All in all, this sounds like a really interesting problem with two sales domains: target the consumers directly and target ISPs looking to have another value-add to their internet products.
>the end user wants to feel like they're completely uninhibited on the internet.
People I know are more concerned that they're unsafe because of their set-ups.
"problem with two sales domains"
I hadn't thought much about the indirect sales model, and this might be where the money is long-term. I'd also argue that hard-to-use routers are likely the root cause of many telco consumer tech support calls. Perhaps the value in the telco reselling such a solution would be to reduce its own costs.
Are you building a small-form-factor computer running pfsense (or something) with a wireless radio baked in ?
A Soekris board is a very small Geode based i386 computer with 4 network ports. It has one usb 2.0, one minipci and one full sized pci. We use the pci for the "modem" device (T1 interface, cable modem, dsl card), the minipci for the wireless radio "bake in" and the usb for local storage. The OS boots and runs read-only from a compact flash card inside the case.
pfsense was too limiting, we use 4 gig CF's with full centos 5 server distros for maximum utility.
Here's the mainboard we use http://www.soekris.com/net5501.htm
Here's where we get the broadband interface cards: http://www.sangoma.com/products/
All the wireless cards and antennas come form netgate, as previously mentioned.
Hmmm. Sounds like I need a big blog post about bootstrapping this kind of business for those interested. Stay tuned.
I have a Harmony remote. The software doesn't ask me about remote control protocols, or any other technical stuff. It just asks me what the model numbers are of the boxes in my family room. Then, it configures activities (Watch TV, DVD, etc.) based on that and configures the remote so that it works. The magic is the large database of A/V equipment so the user doesn't have to specify the details.
I'd like the configuration software to observe my traffic and notice that a particular computer is talking to backblaze. It should ask me if I'd like to make sure backblaze can run really fast without affecting other activities and then just make it happen. I shouldn't have to configure QOS settings using an iptables script I found one a guy's blog (to that guy, thanks a million!).
Grab yourself a WRT54G (or WRT54GL, L for LINUX) and you won't regret the combination :D
you might also look at http://www.fon.com/. The Fonera 2.0 is close to the service you describe. The Fonera routers are built with OpenWRT, coincidentally.