Why Are Routers Dumb?
The most important networked device in your house hasn’t changed in over 10 years.
Very few people even consider that their home wireless router is the device that controls access into and out of their house. It’s like a digital front-door, that hasn’t been locked:
“Tripwire’s Vulnerability and Exposure Research Team (VERT) has analyzed the security provided by the most popular wireless routers used in many small and home offices and found that 80 percent of Amazon’s top 25 best-selling SOHO wireless router models have security vulnerabilities.”
So a large majority of the wireless routers in use today do not adequately protect their owners homes and devices; great!
In the age where all our device are increasingly connected, it’s surprising that the one device responsible for connectivity hasn’t evolved to the growing security, privacy, and usability needs of modern homes.
How many connected devices do you have in your home? For me, the answer is in the double digits. I consider myself pretty adept concerning all things technical, and yet I couldn’t even tell you which devices in my home are using the most bandwidth. Current generation routers make this information all but inaccessable. Do they really expect me to open up a browser window and type in an arcane IP address like 192.168.0.1? What year is it, 1990!?
On configuration
Have you ever set up a Chromecast? The experience is amazing. On setup, the Chromecast creates an ad-hoc wireless network that the iPhone or Android Chromecast application picks up. Then all you need to do is type in your wireless network name and password and, BOOM, it’s configured.
The last wireless router I setup had an overly complicated web administration page that required me to use a username and password to log in; one that I had forgotten. Why don’t wireles routers adopt this model of configuration? I’ll tell you why: they don’t care about consumers.
Currently only one of the wireless router vendors has a mobile app, but it clearly wasn’t a priority of theirs as the experience is terrible: hard to use, infrequently works, and isn’t well supported. This data comes from app store reviews.
RouterZen is building a router to change the sad state of wireless router configuration and control. We want to empower users with a simple and powerful application to monitor and enforce their home networks. Check back later for further blog posts on our plans to change security, content distribution, and more.
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