Discussion: How long before consumer -> commercial

With the recent insurgence of budget Routers into the SOHO realm, and subsequently these routers needing to coupe with the same problems that any other router has to, be it an external Gateway for IBM or some internal gateway for a classroom, How long do you all feel it will take before Linksys, D-Link and SMC begin to package routers for less then $200 for consumers that are basically mircosized versions of the components that people like Cisco, 3COM, DELL, HP etc sell to business' for Thousands of dollars.

Granted your average home user will prolly need to be able to connect to ATM networks nor create a PPP over Serial backbone between networks. But more advanced Firewalls, highly refined capabilites in defining configurations, massive port fields, built in modems. These all seem to be relatively eminant domain.

You can buy PIX 501's on Ebay for like $350-$375 brand new.

I'd say that's a nice price for a firewall as configurable as it is.

I put one in my house and love it.:)


The problem though is is an interface which the home user can understand. The more complicated and robust feature set you have, the more complicated and robust interface you have.

I just don't see a home user being comfortable with either CLI or PDM.

I doubt it'll happen anytime soon, because like you hinted at, those more expensive routers are designed to handle hardware and software demands that are greater and far more complex than consumer routers need to handle. And those features cost money to implement.

Even more than hardware and software costs, I'd be concerned about support costs. Since the average consumer doesn't have a clue when it comes to TCP/IP and routing protocols, consumer routers need to be very close to "plug-n-play". Configuring any kind of advanced features will be more difficult for the average user, which will result in more requests for technical support. More support requests will increase manufacturers' support costs, which will push the price of the router higher. And that's probably enough to push costs right back up to where you can find low-end commercial routers today.

There are already a number of small-office routers on the market that give more features than consumer routers (like VPN and whatnot), but don't offer the full functionality of enterprise models. We could conceivably see some more improvement to that very low-end commercial router market, introducing some more advanced features to low-end models, but I'm skeptical you'll see higher-end hardware targeted at consumers in the near future.

Some home firewall/routers are very configurable. Just not on a per connection basis. Manageable connections (hardware ports) add a lot to the cost of enterprise equipment. And with home user equipment, the wan connection is usually not very configurable (if at all) and the NAT function is take it as is or take it as is. No configuration.

The only commercial feature I've seen that has begun to migrate to the consumer marketplace is SNMP. SNMP allows one to view performance statistics and actually do problem analysis on a misbehaving node. SNMP is what allows utilities such as MRTG to gather and display stats from remote resources. A sample can be viewed here or on my website here.