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Building a freedom-friendly WiFi pocket-router (2020)

kulesz.me

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Re: Building a freedom-friendly WiFi pocket-router (2020)

#41

Post by Tostino »

mschuster91 wrote: post #40
rickdeckard wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Qualcomm seems the only company I'm able to find that makes lte cat 20 hardware, let alone cat 24. I wonder why. Because Qualcomm is the main supplier of modems for nearly all devices in US, and nearly all flagship devices and LTE-routers globally. It's nearly impossible to compete with Qualcomm on pure modem-chipset pricing, because: 1) The sheer volume of chipsets they produce 2) The fact that their modem firmwar…

> Few have tried over the years, including juggernauts like Huawei, Samsung, LG. All failed. Add on top Apple. The only ones who did succeed are Mediatek with their bottom-of-the-barrel stuff... wonder how that is possible.

Again, it's possible because of volume.

Re: Building a freedom-friendly WiFi pocket-router (2020)

#42

Post by actionfromafar »

KRAKRISMOTT wrote: post #30
Roark66 wrote: post #23

I was hoping to this would be an lte-wifi router. Unfortunately it isn't. I wish we had open source modern lte hardware, but it's not just that we haven't got any open source stuff. There is barely any commercial stuff either. Qualcomm seems the only company I'm able to find that makes lte cat 20 hardware, let alone cat 24. I wonder why. Wouldn't open source hardware projects like limesdr have the resources necessary…

Fabrice Bellard has one https://bellard.org/lte/

Of course he has.

Re: Building a freedom-friendly WiFi pocket-router (2020)

#43

Post by gotorazor »

rarkins wrote: post #31

I'm surprised to find there's not more demand for "back to back" travel wifi routers, e.g. so you can connect once to a hotel wifi and immediately all devices are connected via the router's own wifi. This is useful not just for working around device limits but also for simplicity of setup when you have kids.

I own one and tried it for a business trip. It's a cool nerd-toy. It's not cheap and not always easy to setup for anyone who is not technically savvy.

I like it, but I wonder if I want to carry it when I go carry-on only in Europe. I guess most people will trade some privacy and inconvience for weight- and cost-savings.

Re: Building a freedom-friendly WiFi pocket-router (2020)

#44

Post by stonepresto »

Brajeshwar wrote: post #2

This is awesome. I had always had a travel/pocket wi-fi router since a long-long time. Started from the likes of D-Link, TP-Link, etc and now my next target is to check out one from GL•iNet[1]. They are flashable with OpenWRT. Their Beryl AX[2] looks spicy. I find the benefit of a router with you when traveling are; - More secure (you can set it up the way you want). - Your device(s) do not need to be configured to w…

Its important to note their firmware and especially their cloud infrastructure should absolutely not be trusted. Their hardware is probably fine, so just flash OpenWRT.

Re: Building a freedom-friendly WiFi pocket-router (2020)

#45

Post by al_borland »

mcny wrote: post #28
Solvency wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because when someone makes it, the NSA comes knocking.

Even Apple isn't satisfied with its own work on modems if rumors are to be believed. I'm sure Apple will gladly spend billions of dollars in research and own the modem rather than pay Qualcomm year after year. Just some napkin math, Apple had 232M iPhone sales in 2022. If Apple paid USD 8 (low end estimate) per iPhone sold, that would be USD 1.8B just for 2022. If I were Apple, I'd gladly spend USD 2B a year if that…

I’m not discounting the difficulty at all, but at Apple’s scale they need a lot more reliability than what I’d require for my own hacky little modem. From what I’ve read, a big part of Apple’s issues are size and heat, which would be less of an issue as a stand-alone device, as miniaturization is less important.

Re: Building a freedom-friendly WiFi pocket-router (2020)

#46

Post by cookiengineer »

wutwutwat wrote: post #36
cookiengineer wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do they use a different fork/package for AdGuard home? I'm asking this because the smaller models from them are limited to 32MB flash and 128/256MB RAM, which is way too less for typical AdGuard Home usage. Personally I'm using some older Linksys WRT 1900AC/3200ACM models for my malware homelab and for the 1900AC the AdGuard daemon is constantly OOM once a few blocklists are selected. Does anybody maybe know whether…

This isn't an issue with needing a fork that uses less memory. You're loading hundreds of thousands, if not millions of urls into memory so they can be compared to every single dns request happening. Text, even compressed, requires a certain amount of bytes to store, and there is no way to use less memory beyond that point, it's literally, physically impossible. Are there memory gains in adguard? Probably. But I doub…

Well, you could implement an LPM trie that focusses on FQDN labels; for example. Which would greatly reduce the memory usage compared to what AdGuard Home does currently with their per-rulelist-slices.

If you represent LPM tries as JSON and order them by alphabet, you'll get even benefits of gzip on HDD to save lots of space. Just a suggestion and how I would implement it with an eBPF module, not meant as a critic.

Re: Building a freedom-friendly WiFi pocket-router (2020)

#47

Post by al_borland »

anamexis wrote: post #4
Brajeshwar wrote: post #2

This is awesome. I had always had a travel/pocket wi-fi router since a long-long time. Started from the likes of D-Link, TP-Link, etc and now my next target is to check out one from GL•iNet[1]. They are flashable with OpenWRT. Their Beryl AX[2] looks spicy. I find the benefit of a router with you when traveling are; - More secure (you can set it up the way you want). - Your device(s) do not need to be configured to w…

What do you typically hook the router up to when traveling?

Several years back I was staying at a hotel than made me re-authenticate through their portal (enter my name, room number, etc) every time I unlocked my phone. I happened to have an AirPort Express with me. I plugged that in, authenticated once, connected to my new WiFi network instead of the hotel WiFi, and was good for the rest of my trip. Using cellular internet wasn’t a great option at the time/location, so I was really happy I had the little pocket router with me.

Re: Building a freedom-friendly WiFi pocket-router (2020)

#48

Post by gertrunde »

Brajeshwar wrote: post #2

This is awesome. I had always had a travel/pocket wi-fi router since a long-long time. Started from the likes of D-Link, TP-Link, etc and now my next target is to check out one from GL•iNet[1]. They are flashable with OpenWRT. Their Beryl AX[2] looks spicy. I find the benefit of a router with you when traveling are; - More secure (you can set it up the way you want). - Your device(s) do not need to be configured to w…

I've used their GL-AR300M model for a few years quite happily.

Very flexible, i.e. wifi interface and two wired interfaces, and can mix and match roles however you like (e.g. wired uplink & downlink, wifi up/wired down, wired up/wifi down etc), combined with the ability to terminate a VPN on the device.

(Possibly my most silly use was to provide a network connection via a phone wifi hotspot to a wired network appliance).

And size-wise it's about half the size of a cigarette packet. (Yeah - that feels like quite an odd size comparison...)

Re: Building a freedom-friendly WiFi pocket-router (2020)

#49

Post by theshrike79 »

Brajeshwar wrote: post #2

This is awesome. I had always had a travel/pocket wi-fi router since a long-long time. Started from the likes of D-Link, TP-Link, etc and now my next target is to check out one from GL•iNet[1]. They are flashable with OpenWRT. Their Beryl AX[2] looks spicy. I find the benefit of a router with you when traveling are; - More secure (you can set it up the way you want). - Your device(s) do not need to be configured to w…

I got the GL.iNet GL-MT3000 (Beryl AX) a while ago and it's exactly what I needed.

I used to carry around a Huawei 4G router, but it required its own wall wart and couldn't bridge to another wifi. So if the 4G coverage was crap, we had to use public hotel wifis, meaning I had to configure 6-10 devices to use the crappy portaled network.

With the Beryl AX I get:

  - Wifi-bridging. The Beryl has its own network, our devices connect to it and I can wrangle it to any public network
  - Ad-blocking, global DNS via nextdns, Mullvad VPN, Tailscale, all built in and work with just one click.
  - Internet failover if I have multiple active connections (wifi + 4g for example
  - Standard USB power input
What I lost was the 4G connectivity, BUT it has an USB port and I use an old Android phone with a data plan on it. Used the developer menu to make it always default to tethering when an USB cable is connected and it's pretty much fire and forget.

(It's also on sale for around 100€ for Black Friday, well worth it)

Re: Building a freedom-friendly WiFi pocket-router (2020)

#50

Post by rickdeckard »

mschuster91 wrote: post #40
rickdeckard wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Qualcomm seems the only company I'm able to find that makes lte cat 20 hardware, let alone cat 24. I wonder why. Because Qualcomm is the main supplier of modems for nearly all devices in US, and nearly all flagship devices and LTE-routers globally. It's nearly impossible to compete with Qualcomm on pure modem-chipset pricing, because: 1) The sheer volume of chipsets they produce 2) The fact that their modem firmwar…

> Few have tried over the years, including juggernauts like Huawei, Samsung, LG. All failed. Add on top Apple. The only ones who did succeed are Mediatek with their bottom-of-the-barrel stuff... wonder how that is possible.

> The only ones who did succeed are Mediatek with their bottom-of-the-barrel stuff... wonder how that is possible.

I'm not aware of Mediatek competing with LTE modems for routers, not even low-tier. I'm aware they are trying again now with 5G, but also here I'm not seeing big tractions for commercial products...

Could you name an example device or chipset of a Mediatek-based LTE-router?

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