D-Link to support DHCPv6-PD soon

[Ted Mittelstaedt]

Mikael Abrahamsson wrote:
> On Tue, 2 Mar 2010, Michael Adams wrote:
> 
>> We don't have a D-Link product manager but if one pops up here trying 
>> to sell CPE's I'll surely ask for proper v6 functionality :)
> 
> Also ask them about long term plans for the platform. I bought a DIR-855 
> over a year ago, and there has been a single software update for it 
> without any new features and no IPv6 functionality at all.
> 
> Since D-link makes all their money off of new box sales, I guess it'll 
> never get it either.
> 
> It seems like companies like Apple and Google who makes money off of 
> services have much bigger incentive to keep their products updated with 
> new features as opposed to companies that only sell products and then 
> see no reason to supply updates or new functionality. I'd gladly pay 30 
> USD to get a software update for my DIR-855 with IPv6, but I guess 

The 855 uses the second generation Atheros AR9001AP-3NX2 chipset with a
Ubicom processor.  Much of D-links stuff is Ubicom-based.  The problem
with Ubicom CPU's is that Ubicom has not supplied docs about their CPU
microcode and so until recently no backend existed for GCC that would 
allow you to compile code for it.  This originally didn't matter (to 
them) but recently they have seen sales drop off as more and more router
vendors have gone to Linux, and so they released this thing they call
GNUPro which appears to be a proprietary IDE that is a mashup of GNU
code and their own proprietary code.  Since it's incompatible with the
build environments used by both OpenWRT and DDwrt, it's sole purpose 
appears to be to allow Ubicom to run around claiming that their stuff
is now "OpenWRT compliant" when in reality nobody has been willing yet 
to rewrite all of the build scripts and makefiles and such to actually
compile openwrt or ddwrt on their stuff.

> handling money transfers and licenses eats up the profit from such a 
> model...
> 

It's not that at all, in my humble opinion.

These D-links, Airlinks, Belkins, Linksyses and so on are all the same, 
they are just repackagings of someone else's chipsets to make a quick
buck - they are aimed at the bargain-hunters.  These companies use
whatever the cheapest chipsets they can buy, in bulk.  For example
take the Cisco 160N.  There's been 3 hardware revs of that router, rev
1 used an older Broadcom chipset with a bit slower CPU, rev 2 used a
ralink chipset, rev 3 went back to a newer Broadcom chipset.  From the
outside the routers look identical - but inside they are very different.
And the rev 2 units are utter garbage.  The only reason Cisco deviated
from the Broadcom chips for the 160N is because they got a great deal
on a boatload of Ralink silicon.

The bargain-hunters aren't gonna pay money for software updates, so
for any of these companies to put in money transfers and licenses
would be a waste of time, no customers would buy them.

For the last 6 months of so I've been snagging used dd-wrt capabable
routers at flea markets and suchlike, for testing, in an effort to
find a device that is the best platform for dd-wrt.

What I found is that there's NO difference between any of them.  It
makes absolutely no difference who's name is on the plastic, it could
be Airlink, Belkin, SMC, Linksys, Motorola, Buffalo or Dell, every last 
one of them works identically under dd-wrt with the same high reliability

dd-wrt, unlike open-wrt, runs on 2MB flash routers, and there's a lot
more of those in the used market than of 4MB flash routers, that's why
I concentrated on dd-wrt.

And you see here this is the problem, from the manufacturers point of
view.

If these guys simply concentrated on releasing hardware, and let the
openwrt development go along as it did, then all of the various reviews
out there would concentrate SOLEY on the hardware and packaging.

When you have a Motorola, a D-link, and a Linksys all using the same
Broadcom chipset, same flash and ram, then the consumer is not going to
care what device he buys, he's just going to buy the cheapest one,
because he knows that all the devices are going to work the same.

These router vendors don't want to be competing on price - not directly,
at any rate.  They want to go against each other in features.

When magazines do reviews and router "bakeoffs" they NEVER subject the
devices to uptime comparisons.  To do so would mean they would have to
spend months with 20-30 devices sitting on test benches running a
test suite, it would greatly lengthen the amount of time to press, and
tremendously increase the cost of writing the review.

Thus the incentive for these manufacturers is to throw as many features
into the code and long term reliability be damned.

For example, the D-link DIR-655 firmware proudly proclaims itself 
"bittorrent certified"

What the hell is that?  Who but some gamer gives a fig about that?
To me that merely means that the gamer running bittorrent only has
to power-cycle his router every day instead of every hour - but he's
still not going to blink an eye on having to power-cycle his router
at all.

Ted