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Make educated wireless router/AP upgrade decisions

duckware.com

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Re: Make educated wireless router/AP upgrade decisions

#32

Post by Dahoon »

davidhyde wrote: post #31

Great resource! I’ve been meaning to get a ubuquity access point for some time now but am concerned about privacy. Do their access points still phone home and if so, can it be turned off? Are there more privacy centric AP’s out there?

Something made to have open source flashed safely. I use OpenWRT on my access points and router. Maybe not as easy but on the other hand nothing comes close in functionality (unless you buy products made for big business).

Re: Make educated wireless router/AP upgrade decisions

#35

Post by Dahoon »

milankragujevic wrote: post #28

This article is so awesome! I keep telling people who complain to me about slow WiFi speed that it is their device's fault. A lot of mid range Android phones only have 1x1 802.11ac, which is about 433 Mbps PHY at 80 MHz channel. Some more expensive Android phones and all iPhones support 2x2 MIMO which gets you up to 867 Mbps PHY at 80 MHz channel. Some phones have a buggy implementation of VHT80 client, so on 80MHz t…

I'd rather have that ASUS stupidity trophy than a backdoored router, which pretty much all of them are when from an ISP. Not many of them (none?) even care to update regularly.

Re: Make educated wireless router/AP upgrade decisions

#36

Post by davidhyde »

Dahoon wrote: post #32
davidhyde wrote: post #31

Great resource! I’ve been meaning to get a ubuquity access point for some time now but am concerned about privacy. Do their access points still phone home and if so, can it be turned off? Are there more privacy centric AP’s out there?

Something made to have open source flashed safely. I use OpenWRT on my access points and router. Maybe not as easy but on the other hand nothing comes close in functionality (unless you buy products made for big business).

Thanks! Can you recommend a particular model?

Re: Make educated wireless router/AP upgrade decisions

#37

Post by milankragujevic »

Dahoon wrote: post #35
milankragujevic wrote: post #28

This article is so awesome! I keep telling people who complain to me about slow WiFi speed that it is their device's fault. A lot of mid range Android phones only have 1x1 802.11ac, which is about 433 Mbps PHY at 80 MHz channel. Some more expensive Android phones and all iPhones support 2x2 MIMO which gets you up to 867 Mbps PHY at 80 MHz channel. Some phones have a buggy implementation of VHT80 client, so on 80MHz t…

I'd rather have that ASUS stupidity trophy than a backdoored router, which pretty much all of them are when from an ISP. Not many of them (none?) even care to update regularly.

You can pretty easily disable the backdoors with the backdoor admin account I discovered by extracting the firmware from the TR069 ACS server, and posted on my blog.

You have a TR069 interface that operates on a VLAN, you can disable that interface and it does not have the ability to contact the ISP or be contacted (this is not DOCSIS, I'm talking about GPON or xDSL).

In general all ISP combo devices are firewalled off from the WAN side, don't reply to pings and no open ports. If there was a kernel network stack bug, you can't bypass that with your own router, unless it's xDSL in which case you can buy ANY compatible modem and use it with the PPPoE login you can extract from your ISP combo device using instructions on my blog.

If it's GPON you can't do anything, it's a full Huawei system (ONT and OLT) and it needs to authorize with a serial number over OMCI, which you cannot replicate cheaply.

You can use a MikroTik router and a Huawei SFP+ transceiver, but that is too expensive to justify it for moderate-level geeks :)

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