Disruptive Technology: Linksys WRT54G Linux Router

Wireless ISP anyone? Robert X. Cringely writes in his latest column:

WRT54G with Sveasoft firmware is all you need to become your cul de sac's wireless ISP. Going further, if a bunch of your friends in town had similarly configured WRT54Gs, they could seamlessly work together and put out of business your local telephone company.

There is an obvious business opportunity here, especially for VoIP providers like Vonage, Packet8 and their growing number of competitors. If I was running a VoIP company ,I'd find a way to sell my service through all these new Wireless ISPs. The typical neighborhood WISP doesn't really want to DO anything beyond keeping the router plugged-in and the bills paid, so I as a VoIP vendor would offer a bundled phone-Internet service for, say, $30 per month. I handle the phone part, do all the billing and split the gross sales with the WISP based the traffic on his router or routers. If one of my users walks around with a WiFi cordless phone, roaming from router to router, it doesn't matter since my IP-based accounting system will simply adjust the payments as needed.

Disruptive indeed. Crushing 3G business models too. [via Daypop]

Comments

[sean@cheesebikini.com]

But it has a big security hole built in:

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/06/03/0337205&mode=thread&tid=137&tid=193&
tid=215

Glenn Fleishman writes "According to InternetNews.com, a tech consultant discovered that even if you turn the remote administration feature off on a Linksys WRT54G -- the single bestselling Wi-Fi device in the world -- you can still remotely access it through ports 80 and 443. Linksys sets the HTTP username to nothing and password to 'admin' on all of its devices by default. Web site scanning from anywhere in the world to devices that have routable Internet-facing addresses would allow script kiddie remote access, at which point you could flash the unit with new firmware, extract the WEP or WPA key, or just mess up someone's configuration and change the password."