06/30/2008

NETGEAR Inc. announced the launch of the Open Source Wireless-G Router (WGR614L), a full-featured wireless router designed to support a wide variety of applications created by the open source community.

ebizQ received the following:

The high-performance WGR614L, which is "Works with Windows Vista” certified, features a 240 MHz MIPS32® CPU core with 16 KB of instruction cache, 16 KB of data cache, 1 KB of pre-fetch cache, and incorporates 4 MB of flash memory and 16 MB of RAM. In addition to an external 2 dBi antenna, the WGR614L integrates a second internal diversity antenna to provide enhanced performance and range. The router supports free open source Linux®-based Tomato and DD-WRT firmware and will soon support OpenWRT.

The WGR614L is supported by a dedicated open source router community, www.myopenrouter.com, which provides open source firmware downloads, forums, blogs, articles, source code, and user guides, and provides users with dedicated and responsive support by open source experts.

"The launch of the WGR614L is significant to the open source community as there has been a growing demand for more powerful platforms to support a rapidly growing segment of open source enthusiasts that are seeking to create more robust, commercial-grade applications for their wireless routers,” stated Som Pal Choudhury, senior product line manager for advanced wireless at NETGEAR. "In addition to adding a more powerful processor and additional memory to the proven Broadcom® platform, the most popular open source firmware, Tomato and DD-WRT, are available on WGR614L making it easier for users to develop a wide variety of applications. An important feature of our offering is the dedicated and responsive open source community which enables users to easily exchange ideas and troubleshoot issues. New applications currently being developed by this community include traffic shaping applications, redirections to captive portals for hotspots, guest access via a separate SSID, upstream and downstream QOS, and intelligent bandwidth monitoring.

The NETGEAR Open Source Wireless-G Router (WGR614L), which features one 10/100 Internet WAN port and a four-port 10/100 LAN switch, incorporates an 802.11g access point to support wireless connectivity at speeds of up to 54 Mbps. The WGR614L supports static and dynamic routing with TCP/IP, VPN pass-through (IPSec, L2TP), NAT, PPTP, PPPoE, DHCP (client and server), and Bigpond. A Stateful Packet Inspection (SPI) firewall protects the network from intruders, and the wireless connection is secured with support for 40-, 128- and 152-bit WEP encryption, Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA), WPA2-PSK, and Wi-Fi Protected Setup (WPS). Additional security features include: Exposed Host (DMZ), MAC address authentication, URL content filtering, logs and e-mail alerts of Internet activity.