OnHub

Yes, your router uses much CPU for NAT. That's because it is a complex process which requires mangling the packets and keeping lots of state in a big table.

QoS however is relatively cheap. It's merely looking at fixed offsets in the IP packets and deciding which of those (mangled) packets must go now and which can go later. It requires some extra memory for some extra packet-queues, and a lookup in one of iptables' smallest rulesets. That's about it.

Yes, I routed things at slower speeds, but you got to have a perspective on things: You must NAT all the traffic, but only need to QoS the outgoing traffic.

This means that if the downstream speeds have increased 100x recent years while upbound speeds only 10x (which is my fair assesment of the market), your NAT cost is now 110x higher, while the QoS cost is merely 10x.

And QoS was the cheap load. If your router is already buried in other work, I'm sure QoS will feel extra painful, but so would anything else. On a healthy load you probably wont see it in the load-graphs at all.

Also worth keeping in mind is that QoS as a feature has diminishing returns the higher upload-rates you have. If you have 128kbps upload, making sure the right packets get out first is excessively important. If you have Gigabit upload, not only will QoS be more expensive, but you are almost guaranteed to have no benefit from it what so ever.

So yeah, I stand by my argument. QoS is not a heavy feature, even though marketed as such.

Ironically, having users controlling their own routers could be the best chance to do that. That is, toss out the crappy consumer routers and instead embrace the router as a user-controlled computer that sits between the user's devices (including IoT devices) and the ISP connection (e.g., modem). This router could run an open source source OS and be programmed _by the user_ to do all sorts of useful things, such as block ads, block tracking, perhaps even create private overlay networks among family and friends, protected from spam.

In a world where the Internet user can have some respite from radio, TV and other advertising, Google (=slave to advertisers) should not be selling routers. Should they come to dominate the market, the respite will come to an end. Users probably will not even know what happened. No one pays attention to routers as computers. They just want a strong WiFi signal.

Oh, and it's clearly a telescreen.

So, here's what I'd like Google, you tell me if this would be possible and I might buy your hardware.

Could you sell me a wifi router with an open source baseband firmware that you "own" and provide regular signed updates for to comply with the FCC rules? As for the rest of what you have to offer, no thanks - I would need to flash your firmware and run my own software on your router hardware. Thanks!

That said, I think that everyone on HN complaining about privacy and cost and how you can "just install your own firmware" is completely missing the point of the OnHub. Most people have a crappy router running insecure software and does terrible things to the internet and never gets updated. OnHub fixes all that and in a way that my Mom could actually install and use the thing. Almost no other solution (besides maybe the Apple products) would be able to cover all these bases.

So, I'm happy that someone (else) is finally making good hardware with easy to use software. More power to Google and keep the good stuff coming!