FCC Giving Away Wi-fi Routers For Broadband Tests 196
An anonymous reader writes "The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) will be giving away 10,000 Wireless-N routers as part of their program to perform a number of broadband tests, for the benefit of a better connection in the future. They are striving to work on improving a number of issues including latency, packet loss, connection speeds and much more."
Re:$50 for your privacy (Score:4, Informative)
My privacy is worth much more then a crappy router that will accidentally send all my browsing information.
So... What type of sites do you browse that you don't care for the feds to know about? Anime Tentacle Porn usually isn't illegal, you know...
Re:stupid (Score:2, Informative)
Old news. This is already ongoing. It's a pretty darn decent Netgear (almost $100 on Newegg).
Re:Proper Heading (Score:4, Informative)
Simple: the router must use custom firmware that performs bandwidth tests during idle periods and reports the results. Can't do that with any old random router off the shelf.
Re:stupid (Score:4, Informative)
Ahem. The WNR3500L they're giving away [wikipedia.org] is a linux-based (openwrt [openwrt.org]) high-end wireless router. It was $150 when new, now can be had for $80 [newegg.com]. Its successor the WNDR3700 retails for $185 and it's freaking awesome. A customizable linux-based router is precisely what I'd choose if I wanted to do an experiment like this.
Old news, but the router and tracking is awesome (Score:3, Informative)