I have looked through the forum and hardware table, but can't find any suitable router models.

Can anyone suggest a reasonable price router I should buy for testing ?

Thanks,
Ken

Netgear WGT634U. You can pick them up for $30 on ebay these days. They're 8/32 (flash/RAM), USB, and have an atheros minipci card.

Why not use the fonera from fon, nice small box (8/16 Mb) and FREE if you have an invite from someone on http://www.fon.com...

(Last edited by intrax on 14 Mar 2007, 18:00)

Or live near a Starbucks. Promotion Code: 614249339250883

Thanks, but can anyone recommend a router that I can still buy through a retailer.

I'm working on a community wi-fi project and may need more routers later on.

Fon gives out subsidized Fonera routers in exchange for your contribution of a bit of your bandwidth to help the Fon network.  Removing the Fon functionality by replacing the firmware is a blatant abuse of Fon's good will and/or the agreement you have with Fon.

WRAP, or a routerboard

One of the boads above, combined with an Atheros card, or a Meraki Mini are your only real options if you plan to buy more than a few of them down the line.  You could also pick up any Broadcom based, OpenWRT capable router which uses a miniPCI wireless card, and swap that out for an Atheros card.

@Bartman007:

Can you recommend a Broadcom based router with miniPCI ? Also which Atheros card would be compatible ?

Thanks..

The x86 wrap boards are EOL'ed - so if you want something in quantity that won't be an option either.
(the arm9 ones will be interesting)

also magicbox with a atheros card is a option http://www.magicbox.pl

(Last edited by thepeople on 14 Mar 2007, 18:29)

You can still be a FON hotspot, and keep your Fonero promise, while running OpenWRT or DD-WRT. All you have to do is run chillispot, and point to FON's RADIUS servers. I've modified my La Fonera's quite a bit, but they are still accessible as hotspots. If anything, having a whole community full of these things would help FON, not hurt them, so long as you maintain the connection to FON. Further, I see no particular reason why I have to be locked into FON's firmware just to be a Fonero.

If anything, FON should be trying to build community mesh networks. Having randomly placed hotspots is next to useless. How many folks are going to take the time to drive/walk to the middle of nowhere with their laptop just to get on the Internet? Seriously, have you looked at the FON maps and seen how many hotspots are out in the boonies?

I agree with jshamlet that this statement is blatant nonsense and just plain judgemental.... exchanging firmware doesn't remove fon funtionality perse and bandwidth sharing can still be done, but without fon's remote control...

This comment makes it quite obvious that you did not read, or did not understand the terms and conditions you agreed to when you joined the Fon commnunity.  Section 6.7 of the General Conditions states:

6.7. In order to guarantee the correct functioning of the FON Hotspots, the
Linuses and Bills shall exclusively use the official versions of the FON Software.

I don't know how to make it more clear than that.  By loading OpenWRT onto a subsidized Fonera you have violated your agreement with Fon, plain and simple.

Aztech recently replaced their WL730RT4 which is a RealTek 8186 wifi router with WL830RT4 which atheros based. It claims to have better range (2x-3x), I wonder if anyone has tried it on Kamikaze.There is too little information relevent to hacking on this replacement box, I will be glad if anyone can tell me more about it, since the WL730RT4 is not able to run Linux 2.6 and I badly need a box which runs 2.6.

Cheers.

Youre obviously someone who thinks to be always right, well you aren't....

The general terms and conditions also state that this only pertains to the 'correct functioning of the hotspot', so if this can be achieved by using other firmware, which btw openwrt can, this condition has no meaning and therefore is void...

(Last edited by intrax on 15 Mar 2007, 14:28)

Once again:

You can't pick and choose which terms and conditions you abide by.  All terms and conditions must be followed otherwise you have violated the agreement.  I'm not going to participate in this argument anymore as we are hijacking this thread.

kebab: You can find look through the Table of Hardware to find Broadcom boards that feature mini-PCI slots.

@Bartman007
You are obviously no legal expert... there are numerous terms and conditions in the fon agreement that have no legal basis and are void as I have explained before, moreover fon is violating the agreement themselves as the they are altering the firmware remotely without the consent of the hotspot owner...

The hijack of this thread is totally your resposibility...

@kebab - use a fonera, nice toy, FREE and legal !

(Last edited by intrax on 16 Mar 2007, 23:18)