The original vision by Eben Moglen was to use "increasingly cheap ARM, $50-$100 devices that plug into the wall and are not much bigger than an AC adapter." Almost certainly referring to the Sheevaplug. But the reference platform for Freedombox is now a $160+ device with built-in wifi to replace my existing router. If we were going to go that direction I wish it would have used a cheap wifi router with OpenWRT as you have mentioned.
If smartphones ever actually live up to the promise of being a pocket computer, in addition to their mission-critical enterprise gaming and network-locked NSA-friendly voice applications, everyone will already own the hardware for a freedom-hotspot. The phone-as-an-appliance concept has to be burned to its carbon atoms first though, and anti-competitive markets are the worst.
I would have certainly liked something less expensive to play with too, but this $160 thing has two USB ports and an eSATA port which will definitely make things somewhat more interesting -- my SheevaPlug has been struggling to keep up with the USB disk access... I also saw that there is Gig ethernet on this "devkit"-yellow-thing. I am almost convinced of getting one, but I will sleep on it just to make sure this is not just an empty geeko-consumerism moment.
In the end I have to agree. The Sheevaplug was simply not powerful enough for the vision. I hope that we can find something that can drop in price to make this possible.
