The trouble with the WRT54G series (and most of these little routers) is that they have ~200MHz CPUs and ~16MB of RAM. This is, incidentally, why they often crash when you open a lot of simultaneous connections -- memory exhaustion.

I find that if you're interested in experimenting with a Linux router, old PCs are a much better choice. You can get a PowerPC G3 or G4 or a late model Pentium III for practically zero money (if not literally zero money out of a trash heap) and PCI NICs for secondary interfaces are similarly inexpensive. For only slightly more money the G4 Mac Mini is an excellent choice for a wireless router. Then you have a processor that is several times faster and can put arbitrarily much memory and storage in it to suit your needs and then put your favorite Linux router distribution (or Debian) on it and have at it.

What is it about these class of devices that makes them so expensive?

They tend to have 500Mhz CPUs, approximately no RAM, unresponsive very basic web interfaces, and fall over at the touch of a light breeze.

An el-cheapo Android tablet with 1.6Ghz dual core ARM processor, 1Gb RAM, WiFi, and a bunch of other technically hard stuff on top (IPS screen, battery) costs less than one of these style of WAP/switch/routers.

Are they really so different?

Low turnover.

I was always wondering that too. Seems like they should be $25-50 max. Decent hardware with Tomato seems like the way to go.

While an old PC is certainly good hardware spec-wise, they aren't good in the noise, space, and power consumption areas. If you're going to buy something, get something that won't have it's caps blow in 6 months.

I recently got a PC Engines Alix [1]. It's not as cheap as a consumer router but it's got good specs and runs the latest OpenWRT with no problems. Most of all, it's as small, unobtrusive, and fan-less as a consumer router.

There's a mini-pci slot so you can add wireless, but I have an airport express and so I'm just using that in bridge mode for my wireless.

[1] http://www.pcengines.ch/alix2d13.htm

seconding the Alix. They're AWESOME.

I got plain Ubuntu working on it, you just have to set it to serial boot.

You might be shocked by the power bill for running one of those older beasts 24/7.

Idle power consumption, measured at the plug by a watt meter:

Dell Optiplex (1.4GHz Pentium III): 32W ($5.76/month @ $0.25/KWh)

Mac Mini (1.25GHz G4): 17W ($3.06/month @ $0.25/KWh)

Even if a WRT54G uses zero watts, you're still talking about a year before you even recover the $50 cost of one, and in any event ~$50/year is not a very expensive hobby.

It's interesting the way you drew the opposite conclusion that I would. I look at that and think "$50 a year to route a few packets? To heck with that."

Part of that is surely that I don't see what makes having a very ordinary Linux box sitting around making noise a hobby. To each his own.

That is an extremely high cost of electricity.

I live in what I believe to be a relatively high electrical cost area and I pulled up my bill online for 2/13/2013 to 3/14/2013 and I'm paying 13 cents per KWh solely for energy although by the time I add on the substantial fixed monthly meter fee, the state low income assistance tax, 100% energy for tomorrow (in theory, all my KWh come from the local windfarm instead of from coal, in practice its probably merely a greenwashing scam) I'm writing a check (well, paying online) for about 17 cents per KWh, other words the number of KHw divided by the debit to my bank account. So the optiplex would cost me a whopping $4.04 per month lets call it a buck a week. Do I get a buck a week of fun out of my homemade firewall/PBX/other things? Yes.

If I did my math right, this is equivalent to about 4 minutes of labor at my current family income, other words spending time on detailed monthly accounting is more expensive than just paying for it outta the slush fund.

I don't have a wifi network installed merely to roast my brain with microwatts of RF. It exists solely as background infrastructure for a small herd of apple idevices and android phones/tablets all of which are value engineered to be disposable after a year or two. If I had no wifi devices I probably wouldn't have a wifi router. In other words if I wanted to save money in the category of "tablets", I'd look first at not replacing it every year or two. Just the capital/depreciation cost of only one wifi connected idevice is about an order of magnitude more than I'll pay for the electricity to run my home router/PBX/Buncha-other things. Electricity is so cheap its not even a rounding error in total systems cost, and optimizing for the wrong value is always a fail.

Another interesting anecdote is a couple decades ago I was taught as a pretty crude consumer product engineering estimate "a watt for a year is about a buck" but via inflation etc its now about $1.50. Apparently folks in less civilized areas are paying around $2 for a watt for a year. So something that runs 24 hours a day and costs $8 at walmart like a 5 watt clock radio alarm clock uses its own cost in electricity in a bit more than a year. This is also the genesis of trying to save money on wall warts, if a wall wart costs $2.50 and uses $5 of electricity per year, a more efficient switcher that costs $10 and uses only $1 of electricity per year pays for itself rather quickly.

"a watt for a year is about a buck" (fifty). Thanks for that.

A one-year payback time means an IRR (hope I'm using that term right!) of 100%. If you're choosing between putting your money into paying down your mortgage at 6%, investing in the stock market at 3% (plus or minus enormous volatility), insulating your house at 20%, or replacing your old PC router with a cheap MIPS box at 100%, go for the cheap MIPS box!

That's assuming you paid $0 for hardware, and your time is worth nothing.

No, it takes the cost of the router into account. The cost of the now-turned-off PC is immaterial; it's a sunk cost. (Although maybe freeing it up from router duty will make it more valuable since you can, e.g., sell it.)

It's true that it doesn't take the value of your time into account.

Use more recent notebook with a bad display. Much less power needed, and you can get one for free or really cheap. Or use that three-year old notebook you've replaced, and turn off the display.

Or a new higher spec router. I have the Netgear WNDR3700v2 which has 128MB RAM, and has an officially supported open source firmware page http://www.myopenrouter.com/ - there is a manufacturer thats sane...

Unfortunately, that doesn't really help normal customers because they can't be bothered with doing stuff like flashing an alternative firmware

> It also probably won't have enough memory to operate [...] the webinterface.

It does have enough memory for the web interface - at least for the one in KAMIKAZE (8.09.2, r18961), the version mine is running.