Do you mean open wrt? If yes, the devs have serious problems whenever they need to deal with broadcom because of all the proprietary blobs. So the number of supported chipsets is low.
WiMAX has been dead for more than a decade now. Pretty rest of the spectrum is allocated to licensees for cellular/LTE/5G and other military applications.
Do you have an example of one that you know won't run? Effectively all the routers should be flashable unless I'm mistaken and any of them that include GPLv3 or LGPLv3 software must allow it to be custom flashable due to the anti-tivoisation clause.
FCC prohibits you from intentionally flashing custom firmware with the intent to broadcast illegally. You aren't banned from flashing and there's a very vibrant openWRT and DD-WRT community.
The last I read about it was this https://www.tp-link.com/ru/support/faq/1058/ which didn't exactly sound positive. If the safeguards are software only then custom software can break the law using it.
> As part of the Compliance Plan, TP-Link also agrees to take the steps set forth herein to support the development of software by third-parties, including open-source software, for use with its routers, which comply with the U-NII security requirements.
Essentially they were told "Limit radio parameters from being set where possible but you can't ban custom firmware" and that their immediate "oh lets just ban custom fw" response was insufficient and needed to be resolved.
Nowadays any modern router from TP-Link can be flashed to OpenWRT with the generic OpenWRT install instructions.
L4S is not really an express lane. It is a way for applications to know when their traffic is congested, enabling them to scale DOWN their traffic to alleviate the congestion. Less congestion means less latency.
TCP congestion control relies on packets being dropped to signal that a link is congested.
L4S actually includes an extra bit of information in IP packets that routers can mutate to explicitly say when they are congested.
This means that you (a) don't need to play exponential backoff games, (b), don't need to re-send redundant packets, and (c) don't need big buffers in routers.
You need big buffers in routers because otherwise exponential backoff goes crazy. But when you add big buffers, you get latency, which is another kind of suck.
In order to avoid latency, you need to avoid buffers, which is hard unless you avoid exponential backoff. To avoid exponential backoff, you need routers to actually communicate their congestion, by sending more information. L4S does that by using an unallocated bit in IP packets.
I'll need to read up on this, but one potential misuse of this is to just always/often set that bit on traffic you want to suppress.
Which feels much easier and much less heavy-handed than what you can to today. Which technically is a great thing but just wondering about misuse aspect.
This signals congestion explicitly, by a device declaring the link congested and asking others to slow down. TCP congestion control works by detecting when packets are dropped because devices can't keep up.
Also, when the congestion signal disappears you can try to push the transfer speed up immediately, rather than slowly ramping back up like with TCP.
The slowest part is likely to be the network component, and there you can look at the experimental deployment by Comcast, that others have linked to in comments. So far I have not heard of moves by other network providers. Apple already has experimental L4S support for QUIC and TCP: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/network/testing_an...
Congestion control with TCP will eventually still need to send the same number of bytes down a pipe, albeit with added latency. After a while an application could notice and make a change, but it would be long enough for a user to notice poor service.
They already did that, L4S or no. "Fast lanes" usually come in the form of peering links or colocated cache servers, both of which involve actual new capacity. Prioritizing individual flows of traffic over ordinary transit links based on monetary value is something IP is uniquely ill-suited to do.
> "Not sure where this leads but I guess ISPs will start charging toll for express lanes"
Doubtful IMO. I think latency becomes another competitive differentiator, much like throughput/speed is today. (this is a personal comment but I work at Comcast)
Manufacturing is also becoming a core engg. Just ask the semiconductor industry. That was also offshored to Asia from the west by the metric boatload because it was not considered high value and prestigious enough, and now we depend on Asia for the most high value cutting edge chips which power our ... everything, as the western companies have fallen behind and are left with the manufacturing of low value chips. How ironic.
Reminds me of that scene form 'Back to the future' where 1955 Doc finds a faulty chip in the DeLorean's time travel circuit and says "No wonder it failed, it says Made in Japan", then Marty explains to him that in 1985 all the best stuff is made in Japan. That scene aged like wine.
It's all fun and games until you have another global supply chain disruption because some component you thought is irelevant but you now find out is only made in one country that now decides not to play ball or is vulnerable to an aggressor or a natural calamity, and you can't fix it because there's no equivalent manufacturing capacity or even know-how left in the west anymore, as it was all offshored 20+ years ago so everyone who knew that field well, is now retired or doing some other job. But hey, at least some execs got some fat bonuses and career changing promotions out of it.
> Just ask the semiconductor industry. That was also offshored to Asia from the west by the metric boatload because it was not considered high value and prestigious enough
It was and still is also incredibly dirty. Silicon Valley is among the top Superfund site collections for that reason - tons of semiconductor companies were very lax regarding pollution, and while the EPA cracked down on that pretty hard in the US, most Asian countries don't give a shit about the environment as long as the short-term profits are high enough.
> Samsung’s semiconductor facility spilled a large amount of acidic wastewater into its stormwater pond and into a tributary of Harris Branch Creek in Northeast Austin, killing virtually all aquatic life within the 1.5-mile stretch. As much as 763,000 gallons of the acidic waste was discharged into the waterways for a period of up to 106 days.
I don't understand why the only instance monitoring this stuff "regularly" is Samsung itself. The ones with little incentive to actually care about the consequences or accurately monitoring this.
Outsourcing compliance monitoring and accreditation seems to have been a massive things across governments and countries. It’s got quite the track record of carnage too. We learn slowly.
Humanity's entire industrialization process to date has been incredibly dirty and damaging to this planet. It would be silly to think it has all slowed down. It just moved from your back yard.
This is sadly an ongoing battle that never fully settles, be it in the US or the other developed countries.
There will always be more money made by cutting ecological corners, and where there's money there's politics. Fracking, regular industrial waste chemical, agricultural waste, any new spot where regulation isn't set yet, gets relaxed or there's an opportunity to push the issue under the rug it's almost guaranteed to be abused.