DD-WRT the official firmware for Buffalo?

[gerrygadget]

I read that DD-WRT will be the official firmware for Buffalo soon. Has any other vendor done the same? Is this a good move on Buffalo's part?

 

[MGrier]

Hard to say...

Is it a good move? Where do router vendors make their money? It would seem that the hardware is a commodity unless you're building your own radios and radio stacks. I assume the hope is that the value is in the services you provide at the software layer.

dd-wrt is more reliable than any vendor's router software that I've experienced. I have a hard time believing that the core product for all consumer Linksys routers isn't based on the same code base, so either my wrt400n's suckitude is due to something really wrong in the hardware design or their consumer router software is uniformly bad.

I've never had any problems with dd-wrt on any router I've been able to get a "supported" build onto. From my reading of the dd-wrt forums, the only real problems are either (a) general chipset support issues (e.g. Atheros vs. Broadcom SOCs) or (b) hardware mis-design that has requires tailored support.

I think that Buffalo may commoditize here both reasonable hardware and good software so for us the consumer, we'll see products with increasing quality and eventually competition based on price.

We could get the netbook effect where underpowered and perhaps poorly designed hardware becomes standard but heck the standard issue consumer router is the WRT54; I can't imagine that the new world will actually be worse than that.

That said, a lower end company like Buffalo will probably enjoy both improved reliability and lower costs (minimal software development since a standard hardware platform will require essentially no software development) for a period of time before the price war due to commoditization occurs. When that happens they'll be crushed but the crushing is inevitable so they might as well make some dough in the mean time. Thus their entry into other network appliance markets rather than just routers.

Mike

 

[thiggins]

See this story.

It's a good move in that they leverage work done by the open source community and get a halo effect from using a respected software brand with a good reliability reputation.

Buffalo is not really a "lower end" company. The parent company Melco has dominant wireless networking market share in Japan. Buffalo has pulled back significantly in the U.S. market since restarting wireless shipments after they settled the CSIRO suit.