Google to end support for OnHub routers in 2022
support.google.comBtw Onhub does not even have a browser accessible interface like every router has. The only way to manage it is through the app (that they will decommission).
Reviewers and experts called this out at the time, but Google reassured that onhub will not face any issues since they will commit to long term support of the device. As a testament to that they highlighted the overspecification of the device (it had enormous ram and cpu overhead) that would allow it to continuously improve.
Same with Google Wifi and Google Home Nest. Also, fun fact, during an internet outage some time ago I learned that your Google Wifi can't even route locally if you don't have a live connection to the internet. That is, my Desktop could not connect to my NAS -- both wired via Ethernet to my Google Wifi network -- because there was no Internet access.
This is a "feature", and is working as intended: https://twitter.com/madebygoogle/status/1294819896019189761
Don't buy Google home networking equipment.
Disclosure: I used to work for Google and still work for Alphabet.
That response is a little confusing: the management app is Internet only, but it doesn't drop all its routing tables or something just because the uplink is gone. Moreover, the regular DHCP and so on will operate just fine while not connected to the internet.
I don't know what happened in your case and I totally agree that it's a bad experience for troubleshooting (the thing even has some weird API on it [1], so why isn't there some basic web-based management tool), but you can absolutely unplug the uplink and packets flow locally.
We had also had a power outage, which I suspect caused it to lose it's routing tables for some reason. Power was out for about a week, internet was out for about three weeks. When power came back, the Google WiFi was essentially a fancy brick with LEDs until the internet came back too.
Luckily I had a ~15 year old Cisco router I could temporarily replace it with.
Don't misrepresent them. It's a limitation. Not a feature.
Phone apps (and the mobile OSs they run on) have a very limited support lifetime. What phone apps from even a decade ago still run if unmaintained? Or are even available?
No non-disposable hardware should ever depend on a phone app, lest it become equally disposable.
All my electronics and computers from the 80s and 90s run just fine today! In great part because they don't depend on anything.
Electronics from the 2020s are unlikely to be usable in the 2060s simply due to unnecessary dependencies, even if the hardware itself is totally fine. Don't buy things like that.
Reminds me of sous vide and Joule compared to competitors. Ofc, sleek nice clean small design is nice. But only to be able to use with app... Just no. I can get those features and physical controls as well. Albeit touch screen which responses to water drops on machine usually dealing with some amount of condensation near it...
Yeah, I won't touch anything that doesn't have basic controls as physical.
Phone apps eventually failing to work is incredibly frustrating. I own several overall pretty simple Android games which were delivered as APKs which don't run on modern Android. With API targets constantly changing underneath its impossible for even somewhat basic apps to stay functional after a few generations of OS.
Onhub does not even have a browser accessible interface like every router has
I know some people who didn't jump onto Airports because of this. If this is important to you, avoid Amazon's eero line, as well.
Unlike Google's wifi products, all the eeros I own, including the first generation versions, still regularly get updated and are still supported. They also still function when newer revisions are added to the mesh.
Google routers are much worse than other products like chromebooks or pixels because there is no community for flashing, say, openwrt, on these devices. This may be due to the blob situation for APs, which tends to be pretty garbage in general irrespective of vendors.
<<A special discount code has been emailed to OnHub users only, for 40% off Nest Wifi on the Google Store.>>
Looking at that, I'm wondering who is stupid enough to buy a new device from them like this. It is like 'bite me once, bite me again please.'.
'eh, we just self destroyed your device, because, fuck you, but here is a coupon to buy a new one from us that we will also kill in a few years' ...
I dunno, I'd have to do a TCO analysis; if they give you 40% off, and you just assume it'll die after X years but be fully supported for that time and then you upgrade to a faster unit with next-gen wifi or whatever, it could still work out to be a good deal. Like... not my cup of tea (TCO is even nicer when the unit's lifespan is indefinite), but it's a plausible tradeoff.
>and then you upgrade to a faster unit with next-gen wifi or whatever
Do people actually need next-gen wifi? My impression is that 99.9+% of people would be well served by a mid-range 802.11ac router (eg. AC1750[1]) from years ago, because the most bandwidth intensive thing they do is watch 4k netflix (~25 Mb/s).
I'm sure people said the same thing about 802.11ac when everyone was on n, or n when everyone was on g.
Faster is always better. New 802.11ax also improves contention between devices.
I have ~7 year old bog standard wifi router that has more than enough speed to saturate my 200Mbs downlink. Up to 7 or 8 devices online at a time when all family members are home, and there's never a contention issue. I can hog the connection w/ a huge Steam download, and then when they kids start streaming netflix to the TV it's still all shared nicely with me getting a reduced speed as the stream kicks in, everything still working perfectly & taking full advantage of the 200Mbs speed.
That's not meant to refute you: Sure, faster etc. is good. But I'd be pretty angry if I was told it was being bricked by the manufacturer under the conditions that Google is citing when everything still works perfectly well. There's no reason at all that Google has to disable management within the app.
And since I have a new finished basement that doesn't get the WiFi signal very strongly I am considering an upgrade to a modern mesh setup, and was heavily considering Nest Wifi. Now? Nope nope nope nope nope nope nope.
I'd highly recommend looking at just getting a wired AP to put in the basement and have it ceiling mounted. It really depends on how your house was designed, but it could be relatively easy to drop a cable down from an above floor to the ceiling. You'll get much better performance having a wire carrying the signal than trying to do WiFi mesh setups, especially when you're trying to cover an area that already has terrible WiFi performance.
In my experience even Ethernet over powerline is better than using WiFi mesh, since there's still a wire, even if it's noisy. That is, it provided a more stable connection, even if the peak speed is not theoretically as fast.
Your mileage may vary.
Your mileage can definitely vary with Powerline Ethernet adapters. When they work they're amazing, when they stop working it can be rather annoying. Most don't have any real feedback other than a small handful of LEDs on the device. I've had several different models from different vendors over the years using a few of the various revisions of standard and different electrical system setups. They would usually work pretty well for weeks, then suddenly lose their sync for unknown reasons requiring a hard reset. Often this happens right when you're in the middle of watching a movie or playing a game, requiring you to stop what you're doing, unplug both devices, wait a few seconds, plug both back in, and it magically starts working fine again. I've had that experience on all of the units I've used. It has been about 5 years since the last time I used one, I'm sure they've constantly had improvements.
That said though when they work I got pretty much the rated speeds all the time without any intermediate dropouts or other issues. Stupid simple to use, just plug both sides in and suddenly network. This was sometimes even without both units being on the same circuit, but at least one of the legs had a decently short run to the electrical panel.
You live in a house. In an apartment there are 50 other networks within a 100 feet of you.
You actually don't know my residential environment. I don't live in an apartment with 50 networks, but I can see ~30 SSID's right now. On a semi-regular basis I benefit from going into my router config to choose the channel with the least congestion. For me, that's not worth spending $$ to upgrade when speed & latency are not otherwise an issue. I don't begrudge people who decide to upgrade to get that incremental boost, but I don't think it should be forced on them. Because I'm not claiming there are no benefits to upgrading. I'm saying that people who have lived with their current WiFi setup-- hiccups & all-- for years shouldn't be required to pay more if they're satisfied with their own status quo.
>I'm sure people said the same thing about 802.11ac when everyone was on n, or n when everyone was on g.
You'd probably be well served by 802.11n right now. Take a typical setup of 802.11n with 2x2 MIMO: theoretical speeds would be 300Mb/s. Halve that for "real world" performance, and you have speeds of 150Mb/s. That's more than enough for multiple streams of 4k netflix. Looking around it looks like most 802.11n adapters of the day (I checked 2011, the spec was released in 2009) only support 2.4ghz, so spectrum congestion might be an issue in high density areas, if we halve the speed again to account for this, we get 75Mb/s, which might be slower than your internet access, but is still otherwise usable.
Based on this, I'm thinking the prudent strategy is to upgrade every other wifi generation.
802.11n with 5 GHz is okayish, but using 2.4 GHz can be brutal. It's not just the bandwidth, the whole frequency band is just bad. My latency regularly goes through the roof and voice calls are noticeably worse than with 5 GHz wifi.
802.11ac mandates 5 GHz, so it's a reasonable baseline. I don't even care if it's SISO, MIMO or whatever as long as I don't have to fall back to 2.4 GHz.
At the moment, I would definitely choose an older 802.11ac device with mature open-source drivers over any 802.11ax device. Especially since last I checked, the only affordable 802.11ax routers were limited to 2T2R, so they would be a step backwards in peak throughout for some client devices.
Latency is a thing, and newer networks have lower latency or are affected by other clients being slower (eg MIMO and improved channeling), though other ethernet devices can still have a big effect (eg remote server latency, dns latency, retransmissions).
Latency is exactly why I'd prefer a last-gen radio with open-source drivers. An 802.11ac router with the latest open-source drivers (ath10k and mt76) will give you better real-world latency, because there are open-source developers working to optimize for the metrics that actually improve real-world user experiences rather than seeking the largest achievable throughput numbers on naive speed tests.
802.11ax on its own does nothing to address the problem of wasting too much airtime serving a client at the extreme edge of your AP's range where neither 802.11ax or ac transmission rates will work. That kind of problem must be tackled with better QoS strategies that are not inherently tied to any particular generation of the WiFi standards, but in practice can only be developed and tested for chipsets that are sufficiently hackable
Faster is not always better.
I upgraded to 10Gbps for my network and I barely use above 1Gbps, what I originally had.
I upgraded my Wi-Fi to wifi6 and I can’t tell any difference at all, despite having around 40 wireless devices on my network. All our phones support it and I literally don’t notice anything.
We may be getting to the point where more speed is not as important.
We may be getting to the point where more speed is not as important.
To an extent this is true, but part of this is just how long US broadband speeds stagnated, especially upload speeds, killing off any product ideas that required high upload bandwidth. I'm sure that over time we'll find uses for more speed.
> I upgraded my Wi-Fi to wifi6 and I can’t tell any difference at all
How many WiFi 6 clients do you have though? If all (or even the large majority of) your clients are 802.11ac clients, you're not going to notice any real differences.
The biggest differences are going to be spectral efficiency especially when it comes to many devices chirping small packets. So think having lots of IoT things around the house while you're doing VoIP and gaming stuff. Things like streaming video won't really see an incredible difference most of the time. Streaming video usually has at least several second buffers and isn't actually constantly clogging the band, its brief blasts of several seconds worth of data at a time.
> I'm sure people said the same thing about 802.11ac when everyone was on n, or n when everyone was on g.
Certainly not - 802.11ac felt like the biggest leap, 802.11n was decent for browsing, but when starting a download I would try to switch to Ethernet for it not take too long. With 802.11ac I didn't have to bother anymore as usually the difference was negligible.
> Faster is always better.
For wifi faster isn't always better if there's nowhere to go. That is, if the uplink from home isn't itself faster.
I ran a Asus ac-68u at home at home for years and was generally happy, but the speed bump from upgrading to a ax-86u has actually been very substantial even for ac devices.
BTW I’m using a mikrotik router, but I’m not sold on Ubiquiti for home use even though I’ve deployed plenty of them at our office - my impression is that while the management on them is nice and they may be better for handling large numbers of clients, the more high end home aps have long range external antennas and seem better at providing high speeds to a small number of devices. It’s hard to find many objective tests of that though…
> Do people actually need next-gen wifi?
Streaming VR to a wireless headset (SteamVR on Oculus Quest) is generally considered to require Wifi 6, though that is admittedly a niche use currently.
The question isn't whether people need it, question is whether people were going to use it as a reason for upgrading anyways
is Bandwidth the only factor?
What about 30-50 smart home devices? Every bulb or switch, water sensors, etc. Some of modern equipment is load balancing old legacy stuff better, no?
I don't have an IOT house, so I don't know how well they'll cope. That said, most IOT chips (eg. the famed ESP8266 and most variants of its successor, ESP32) seem to only support 802.11n, a standard from 2009. Therefore any benefits are probably not going to be gained by upgrading to an 802.11ac router. Newer routers might have beefier cpu/ram, but IOT devices are pretty low bandwidth, so I doubt they'll be taking up much cpu/ram to handle them.
For smarthome, I would recommend Zigbee devices. That way, you limit your attack surface to just your Zigbee gateway, rather than every single light bulb in your house, with the added benefit that those don't clog up your Wi-Fi.
We have the Philips Hue gateway at home (which has limited support for other brands, but IKEA Trådfri bulbs work), but you can also get a Zigbee USB stick/Raspberry Pi HAT, install Home Assistant or deCONZ, and go wild without being tied to any vendor.
Why would you want to cram 50 so called "smart" devices is the real question. Is your quality of life improved by having your lightbulbs and switch connected to the internet. Why do you need sensors at all?
My home is completely analog, like I even have to operate my windows blinds manually. I have lived in a totally connected and electrified house and I didn't view any improvement in my quality of life. Only downsides when the power grid had an issue.
Well, if you want an example, I have about about a dozen PM and CO₂ sensors spread around the apartment, and some outside of it. I live in an extremely polluted area and it allows me to make decisions on when it's (relatively) safe to open windows (or even inside doors if it's really bad outside).
PM 2.5 may be in the range of a couple micrograms/m³ in one room (with air purification) and 100× that in the other adjacent room, so it makes sense to have sensors everywhere.
Still very far from 50, though.
My quality of life is improved by heating that can be turned on remotely (while im on my way home) or on a timer (before i wake up).
Lightbulbs not so much.
You don't need to have it internet connected to have your thermostat on a timer. My home has responded to heat or cool the house based on when I wake up, when I leave, when I come home, and when I go to bed for well over a decade all without needing an internet connection to do so. My thermostat doesn't go dumb just because the internet went down or because it became unsupported and got bricked.
The only thing I wish it would do would have better multi-zone temperature and humidity sensing to know to turn on the circulation fan when the edges of the house get too hot/cold compared to where the thermostat is. Even then that doesn't require the internet, it could be done with cheap 433MHz temp/humidity probes running on button cell batteries for years.
I do need internet if i want to tell my heating to turn on 1hr-30 mins before i come home though.
Or to respond to the weather (e.g. start warming the house earlier coz it's a particularly cold day).
If your life is very strictly regimented maybe it's less useful.
This doesnt mean I want a cloud connected thermostat. I want something that talks to homeassistant.
I tell my thermostat my schedule once and how I want my house to be, and it makes sure to hit those temperatures when I want it to. I shouldn't have to "tell it" I'm coming home, it should just do it.
Respond to the weather? Its a thermostat. Even a decent bi-metallic strip thermostat will "respond to the weather". Its not like the thermostat needs to do anything different if its an especially cold day outside, it will keep the indoor environment as you programmed it. How do you think thermostats worked before the internet?
The only "respond to the weather" idea I'd like would be to account for especially humid days as sometimes the temperature is fine but its really humid in the house. But once again it doesn't need to reach out to an API to figure out the humidity outside at some airport 20mi away, it just needs a local humidity sensor.
If I am not in the house or I am asleep it is a waste of energy to heat it.
I find it weird that you get indignant at the idea of a little more automation than a timer.
>How do you think thermostats worked before the internet?
Either wasting money heating an empty home when I went out or I came home to a cold house and then turned on the heating. I remember.
I also remember thermostats which didnt understand the concept of weekends, etc.
> If I am not in the house or I am asleep it is a waste of energy to heat it.
I agree, which is why I use a multi-stage programmable thermostat. Once again, it turns off when I leave, turns back on a bit before I get home, lets it warm/cool a bit while I sleep, and then starts back up around when I wake up.
> I find it weird that you get indignant at the idea of a little more automation than a timer.
If you're manually telling it you're on your way home that sounds like less automation to me. Personally I'd take the tiny bit of efficiency hit having it heat the house maybe an hour or two off from my regular schedule than having to micro-manage turning my thermostat on and off on a more expensive device that will probably be eventually bricked.
I'm just saying, the vast majority of the quality of life improvement from your internet connected thermostat could have been achieved with just a 7-day 4-stage programmable thermostat that has existed for 20 years. Its nice you're happy with your expensive device that's beholden to some cloud server, I hope it stays online for a few more years.
>Its nice you're happy with your expensive device that's beholden to some cloud server
lol I guess you made a bad guess about what homeassistant does or you simply chose not to read what i wrote.
Either way it's nice that you won the argument against the straw man you argued with.
Ah, I missed where you said it was Home Assistant. My mind was mostly thinking about all the Nests and other cloud thermostats people tend to buy these days what with the original article talking about killing the device. Still, you need to do maintenance on your Home Assistant server while my 7 day thermostat requires no upkeep other than changing a AA battery every few years.
It being beholden to a cloud server is only half of my point which is the vast majority of the key functionality you talked about could have been achieved with a far simpler and cheaper device that has absolutely no network connectivity at all. Sure, you wouldn't be able to datamine exactly when your thermostat kicked on or off, but to me pressing a button to tell it you're coming home is less automation than your home just automatically being at the temp you want when you're there. If your schedule fluctuates by several hours every day for when you wake, when you leave, when you come home, and when you sleep I guess it could be useful to reprogram that on the fly remotely but for the vast majority of people a 7 day 4 stage programmable is fine. Not everything in my house needs to have an IP address.
You TCO is negative in all cases. Because you had something that was working enough, otherwise you would have changed it. But now you need to spend money to change. Even if for a good price.
Also you have to take into account that you pay but not have 2 working devices in the end (old and new). Just one.
Sure, if the new one was providing significant value, there could have been an interest. Like if you network was saturated. But that would be surprising because currently 8/10 years old ac wifi routers are more than enough for most households usage.
Also, what is interesting is the Stockholm syndrom: some comments here are saying that it was probably old enough to be changed, so not so bad. But in that case, did you think about that, that you would probably have to change your router for a new one before receiving the obsolescence notice from Google?
> currently 8/10 years old ac wifi routers
802.11ac was released in 2014, only 7 years ago. You wouldn't have a 10 year old AC router, and really probably wouldn't have an 8 year old AC router quite yet.
I would only agree with that if Google fully published their support roadmap ahead of time so that I could know what I'm buying. Especially in light of the $ at any given time: $300 when there's 6 years of support ahead is fine, but it's not worth $300 anymore when there's only 4,3,2 years of support left. How can you possibly do a TCO analysis without that information?
They at least do this for their Pixel phones.
I probably will. The OnHub has performed substantially better than the other consumer wireless routers I've used, and after 5 years it's due to be replaced anyway. Might as well take the discount.
Why is it due to be replaced? Has your bandwidth speed substantially improved to the point that OnHub can no longer keep up? Because otherwise it sounds like you're happy with where you're at. There's no reason to replace a well-functioning device that does everything you need just because it's reached the end of the ever-shortening consumer electronics lifecycle. My own router is about ~7 years old, I have twice the devices connected as I did when I purchased it, and it still handle my 200Mbs broadband just fine among all devices in use.
WiFi isn’t that simple: every generation makes substantial improvements in things like how they handle contention with multiple clients or interference. Since most of us have more than one device active these days, that is noticeable — especially if you have devices which also talk to each other rather than exclusively over the internet.
When I replaced my 2016 OnHub + Google WiFi mesh with an Eero WiFi 6 system, I saw across the board improvements in latency and bandwidth from almost every client (faster ones more than doubled). We also lost the sporadic hangs for iOS devices which Google never fixed for totally innocent reasons.
I think that what is simple for me is that I don't make those judgements based purely on age. If I'm not having noticeable problems with a 6-7 year old router then I'm not going to write off forced obsolescence as "well it was time to upgrade anyway". I already get the full 200Mbs speed that I pay for and 15-20ms ping & low jitter. Upgrading isn't going to do a lot for me.
Everyone is able to make their own determination on that sort of thing, when they should upgrade. Or at least they used to be able to do that for this product class. Google is now baking in expiration dates that aren't even published at the time of purchase.
I’m not defending Google but almost everyone I know who replaced a 6+ year old router then spends a month saying they should have done that sooner because the differences were noticeable. Given how heavily most people use WiFi now, spending something like $0.50 per day for your entire family seems like far from the most pressing area to economize.
The other thing to consider is how the rest of the market compares: a lot of people have routers which still work but are no longer secure, so this entire field seems right for a legal requirement of, say, a decade support period and/or mandatory recycling.
far from the most pressing area to economize
$0.50/day seems like a small thing until you're strapped for cash but all of a sudden have to pay $500 all at once to replace your Google mesh network hardware.
That aside, as much as this particular example frustrates me, it's not my primary concern: It's the overall trend of forced obsolescence taking yet another step forward and increasing issue of e-waste.
Mandatory recycling is also problematic. It could mean that products that might have ample community support (e.g., via OpenWRT) would still be illegal, and in general would take away a user's right to support & maintain their purchases. It is also something that would be ripe for regulatory capture.
Separate from those issues is the consumer's ability to make an informed choice: A product with a potential expiration date should be required to market it as such. Google does this with Pixel phones; hopefully after this they will begin doing it with their other products as well, and I think that in general it should be required: MS does this with Windows, plenty of other vendors do it, there's no reason it can't be a universal requirement as part of consumer protection laws.
> $0.50/day seems like a small thing until you're strapped for cash but all of a sudden have to pay $500 all at once to replace your Google mesh network hardware.
You're using a definition of “all of a sudden” meaning “at some point within the next year or so”? Think about how much the average person will spend on their ISP bill in that same timeframe — again, I don't think this is great but it doesn't seem that dramatically different from, say, what happens when you have to replace your router in a hurry because Linksys orphaned it and your ISP is going to yank access due to an unpatched vulnerability.
> Mandatory recycling is also problematic. It could mean that products that might have ample community support (e.g., via OpenWRT) would still be illegal, and in general would take away a user's right to support & maintain their purchases.
I think you misunderstood the concept: requiring the manufacturer or reseller to recycle products which would otherwise end up in a landfill when people don't want them any more wouldn't in any way force the owner to turn over a device they want to keep. More importantly, building incentive structures around this would do something about the 99.995% of devices which were never going to get community firmware support.
Similarly, I doubt simply advertising expiration dates would have changed this: Google never said they were offering lifetime support for OnHub and very few people would expect them to offer support massively longer than the rest of the field when things like the WiFi standards improve more frequently than that. If they'd said “7 years of support”, I doubt it would have changed many decisions.
>You're using a definition of “all of a sudden”
That is a fair point, assuming a person knows about the EOL. The article for this is "Support for OnHub routers ending in 2022". If that is the same email subject Google uses for email outreach (assuming they go that far) then it's something that many users would simply ignore, especially since the majority are nowhere near as security conscious as people here in the HN community. So I think there is potential for a sizeable % of owner to have "sudden" expenses.
your ISP is going to yank access due to an unpatched vulnerability.
If it's hardware I get through my ISP then they replace it. If it's not hardware from my ISP, how would they even know? I'm not sure that an uplink from the cable model to WiFi router will give them that info. And even if it did, they'd have no idea if I had simply slapped OpenWRT on the router negating the EOL issues.
I think you misunderstood the concept:
I'm talking about the people who would still want the device. Maybe a small portion, admittedly. My bigger concert is the moral hazard presented by giving OEM's an incentive to have ever shorter & shorter support windows. Just look at the CPU req's for Windows 11: Many millions of pre-8th gen Intel chips have the horsepower to run Windows 11. Just imagine how awful it would be if every system with an older chip had to be tossed in the trash.
Google never said they were offering lifetime support for OnHub and very few people would expect them to offer
That's a reasonable point. But in the vast majority of cases "support has ended" does not mean "your device is now (nearly) useless.".
For things like ongoing patches & similar maintenance, I understand that it can't reasonably go on forever. I do believe that vendors should have to publish their support horizons though. I'm not sure why you don't think this would help: It would tell users upfront, given that more & more of Google's products rely on their cloud support, when it will become a brick. I'm sure that folks who bought an OnHub 3 months ago would have appreciated knowing it would barely last a year.
With the Pixel this provides customers with a very useful piece of information when making a purchase decision. I know I take it into consideration: I just had to upgrade (dropped my phone-- no more crappy minimal cases for me now) and their support horizon was a factor in determining whether I went for a 5a or paid a little extra for a 6. (I chose the 6... better spec's, but I liked the style more too. :) )
So, I think expiration dates-- especially if more prominently displayed than with Pixel phones: think big bold Letters on initial config & an email where the use has to actively confirm receipt... some people will ignore and just click through, but they had their chance so long as Google doesn't bury it in a wall of text.
Still, your point about security vulnerabilities is well-taken. If there was to be any mandatory recycling, it would need be a very generous timeframe. It would be somewhat unique for consumer products, but safety limits on usable lifetime for equipment exist in various industries. I would want regulations to approach the topic with extreme caution though to at least minimize vendor influence.
Did you notice those improvements or did you just do benchmarks to see if they improved? Not everyone's needs are the same of course, but I have no complaints about my seven year old Nighthawk R7000. Latency-sensitive devices like game consoles are ethernet, phones and laptops are 5GHz, and everything else is 2.4GHz.
I think this is a case of first world country arrogance of putting perfectly working things in the landfill just for the heck of it.
I found it noticeable for anything latency sensitive - conferencing, Terraform/SSH, etc. (losing Google’s iOS hangs was extremely noticeable, of course, but that’s for a different reason)
The key thing to remember is that there’s considerable variability across different peoples’ experience. If you live in a widely spaced suburban house, you probably don’t need to worry about interference the way an apartment dweller does or even someone in a city where the neighbor’s property starts a lot closer. The layout and materials used in your house similarly have a big impact on whether your devices are operating on 5GHz close to a base station or 2.4GHz further away.
Since you have your latency sensitive devices on Ethernet, you probably are fine with an old AP. Cables are definitely better but not everyone has permission or a suitable way to run them (my house built in the 1930s did not include spare conduit).
I’m guessing that Google has datamined everything that it could from all of the users who would get something like this, so there is no point financially in supporting it.
Make sure you check out some of the other "pro-sumer" lines first. I moved from a flaky consumer router which dropped Wifi all the time to a Ubiquiti which has been rock solid.
I'm not recommending Ubiquiti specifically given recent events but just using it as an example of a prosumer brand, even a few years old now and it still gets firmware updates, where as my old consumer router would be lucky to get any updates at all.
> Make sure you check out some of the other "pro-sumer" lines first
Unless you enjoy networking as a hobby, I would worry with that strategy that there is a sizeable risk of wasting your time with unreliable devices, with ongoing maintenance work, or having to rework your network in a few years.
My current solution is to buy Unifi UAP-AC-LR (~120USD) and configure it as an access point using the “Unifi Network” app from my phone, and hopefully never touch it again. I have done this at friends, and fixed their WiFi woes, without requiring much of my time (occasional complaints that the WiFi isn’t working, but not due to the device*, just ISP or router issues). Easy to plug the AP into a new router if you change ISP or move houses.
* Well, one device just stopped working with a hardware fault: I think due to being installed in a very hot area. I haven’t had software issues or flakiness. Flakiness is my previous experience of prosumer devices and what I most want to avoid.
Doing exactly this works well, but the other bits of UniFi kindof suck. The desktop software is flaky and I’ve seen some really unreliable firmware updates. The non AP hardware is really overpriced as well
That works great if you can run PoE everywhere.
Do they have a unifi version that I can plug in to a wall outlet without having to upgrade everything to PoE too?
Unless you have PoE you can't add a unifi AP for $120 USD. And getting into PoE isn't cheap.
Some UniFi APs used to come with PoE injectors. I’m not sure if they still do, but it looks like they still sell them for $8:
https://store.ui.com/products/u-poe-af
If someone is willing to spend a bit more, the 8 port managed GbE switch with 4 PoE ports is $110: https://store.ui.com/products/unifi-switch-8-60w
That said, they’re coming out with a “UniFi Dream Router” for $80 (might be more once it goes GA, it’s in beta now via their Early Access program) that has the wifi, gateway, and management all in one device https://dongknows.com/ubiquitis-wi-fi-6-unifi-dream-router-u...
If someone is interested in going all-in on UniFi, their best solution is coming in the form of the Dream Machine Pro SE that can support their camera platform (Protect) along with Network and includes a 10Gb SFP+, 2.5GbE, and a PoE 8-port switch which should be fine for most houses (e.g. 5 wired PoE cameras + 3 PoE APs).
I’ve been into Ubiquiti ever since the OG EdgeRouter, so my current setup is a bit more complex. I’m not happy that they’ve ended support for UniFi Video that I ran for years on a NUC with Ubuntu that also hosts other small home automation stuff and Jenkins. I finally caved and got a Cloud Key 2+ to run Protect, which only runs on their hardware, even though it’s just 64-but ARM. At least it’s fast, I guess. It would be great if they had any real competition in this space, but all the other DIY and enterprise options really suck for cameras. MikroTik is fine for networking gear, and with the prices I’ve been seeing on some wifi mesh systems and even “gaming” routers, people could be getting Aruba Instant On or Ruckus Unleashed systems that would be infinitely better than the junk that they’re passing off as “gaming” routers these days.
When you buy a single Unifi AP they include POE injectors (i.e. a power brick that injects power into ethernet).
You don’t need to ‘run’ PoE everywhere, it just provides power over the cables you are already using.
Yep, Unifi + bridge mode for the win. Make wireless as dead simple as possible and move your intelligence to your router/firewall.
>Re: Ubiquiti
Investigators say they were able to tie the downloads to Sharp and his work-issued laptop because his Internet connection briefly failed on several occasions while he was downloading the Ubiquiti data. Those outages were enough to prevent Sharp’s Surfshark VPN connection from functioning properly [0]
Yeah, surfashark takes an extra few minutes to load after you start your machine. Maybe he got over eager. I wonder if he has a good lawsuit case for this "Your honor, I was trying to do crime but the failure of the defendant's product resulted in a life-ruining indictment"
[0] https://krebsonsecurity.com/2021/12/ubiquiti-developer-charg...
Yes! I’ve been using a Microtik router and Ubiquiti access point for a couple years now with zero issues.
I replaced Ubiquiti with refurbed Ruckus stuff and am extremely happy.
I would suggest taking a look at synology. The 2600ac is going on 6 years old and about to get the latest feature release (1.3) with no immediate plans to eol it. And unlike Google they have a long history of LTS.
This is precisely what I did. My OnHub was having issues about 18 months ago, so I did some research. I was mostly interested in getting a browser-based interface back, push security updates from the vendor, and buying from a company that had a good track record of treating customers well and supporting their products. I picked up the Synology and have been very impressed. It got my family through the pandemic scenario of four simultaneous video conference streams with 30+ participants each with flying colors. This is my third Synology product, and I have an extremely high opinion of them. The other two products are NAS products, and both have been just as bulletproof for me.
How do you find the RF performance? For me the OnHub was vastly better than other home wifi gear I've used, but would consider more trustworthy replacements if they have comparable performance...
I guess I don’t have a ton to compare it to. Installed for the neighbors and they get signal from the office in the front of the house to the pool out back, so good? Before that they had a cambium router running DD-wrt that didn’t have anywhere near the range.
You can also buy multiple, they do mesh networking either wireless or wired. They also just announced a 6600 that supports WiFi-6e.
Is five years enough?
For you maybe.
I think it is nothing like enough. My guitar amplifier is about twenty years old.
My house is thirty and will probably make it to 300 (climate catastrophes wiling)
I do not buy Google products, if I did I would stop.
Well, electric guitars have been around for over 80 years and houses even longer.
This whole wireless internet thing is pretty recent and is getting increasingly better every year.
I have some power tool from the 60, with a deviation of precision about a 1/100mm from manufacturing time, while abused in factory. Heck, I just got a new drill from 1959, with the same. They were also “recent” design at the time…
But if you are living with the current performance just fine, why do you have to seek a faster one.
As long as I can work, play 2 concurrent movies while having videocalls at the same time, I don't see the point upgrading just for the sake of upgrading. Unless the security of my devices is at risk.
> after 5 years it's due to be replaced anyway
Are people really replacing their home network infrastructure every 5 years?
The best move is to add cables where possible. I’ve got a slightly upper scale consumer mesh network (with Ethernet backhaul) for anything that moves, everything else is connected via cables (have to admit that I only had to draw one cable from the fiber outlet to the other side of the room where an Ethernet outlet was ready) and gigabit switches, both of them at a very low cost. I get almost the same speed and latency at any wired device as I do at the router, even though the cables going to the rooms are 10+ years old.
Unless you’re living out in the wild with no devices to interfere, speed and reliability will be well worth the effort and save a lot on ineffective Wi-Fi gear.
Very much agreed.
If a network-attached device is always in one place and it has an ethernet port, it has a cable.
If it's always in one place and it doesn't have an ethernet port, there's a cable to the wireless point in that room or the next.
5-port gigabit switches are about $20 each. A 12-port gigabit switch anchors the whole thing. None of them take configuration.
This is harder but not impossible for people who live in apartments; white cable run along the edge of the ceiling or along the foot of the wall is a good bet.
Definitely this. I use any time where I have to open a wall as an excuse to put Ethernet in it. Bathroom getting renovated? Great, use the opportunity to run Ethernet up to the second floor. Garage has a drywall puncture with moldy insulation behind it? Great, run Ethernet.
The upside here is adding Ethernet has been very low cost for me: Literally the cost of the cable and the keystones. Downside is I've been here like two years and my Ethernet runs are still somewhat random/piecemeal.
In one case, which has performed surprisingly well for basically the whole two years: I used an existing coax run with a pair of Motorola MoCA adapters, which provides a gigabit connection from my basement to a room that's particularly hard to retrofit a connection to.
Wi-Fi is for guests and smartphones. Ethernet is for life.
> The best move is to add cables where possible.
Can't recommend this enough. WiFi is great for mobility but it's just not that reliable. For anything that doesn't have to be moving, pull some ethernet to it and be happy for the long haul.
I use the same Linksys WRT54GL since around 2006 and it never drops the connection. I flashed dd-wrt on it back more than a decade ago and it "just works".
Heck no - ask an ISP, they keep them boxes in homes till they drop.
5-6 years seems to be about the time between wifi revisions (1999, 2003 (g), 2009 (n), 2013 (ac), 2021 (ax/6))
> Looking at that, I'm wondering who is stupid enough to buy a new device from them like this
It seems this is more common than it should be. Apple users who complain of new products lacking features older products had, but who continue to buy those products come to mind.
And that is why the very first thing every new WiFi router in my household gets is a fresh installation of OpenWRT in place of whatever vendor software it has.
And I look at compatibility matrix before buying it.
This strategy has worked very well. I upgrade on my terms.
Ditto; I only buy wireless hardware that can run openwrt on the day that I buy it. I may not flash it on that day, but I like to know that I can. My router is an x86 machine running opnsense.
> I may not flash it on that day, but I like to know that I can.
I agree in the abstract, but I've seen enough devices ship OTA updates that make switching harder that I prefer to just cut over ASAP these days. (This is a general approach, not just for network gear; same as how I unlock my phone bootloaders right out of the box so I don't have to deal with data wiping)
What machine do you recommend? I've thought about having a custom router but I have wondered both if it is worth it and what machine I should use.
If you've ever built a computer, just put together something lowend. MicroATX is usually least cost and easy to work with.
Something like https://pcpartpicker.com/list/3MpGmk
Some people don't care for Realtek nics, you can spend more to get Intel if you want. You could put more ram, or storage, or whatever if you're going to do more than routing. Ryzen might be nicer, but they don't have a cheap CPU with integrated graphics right now, and it's not worth paying $100 more to get one for a router, IMHO. If you can find a motherboard with IPMI for cheap, that'd be nice, but I can't, so I just use a spare monitor and keyboard when I need to.
There's small x86 router boards around, and they're cool, but if anything goes wrong, your options are limited. If anything in this fails, you can get the part replaced at your local computer store, even if that's BestBuy.
I typically use whatever I have laying around. Right now I've gone atypical since I currently have a 10 gbps symmetric connection and my leftover hardware isn't quite fast enough to route it.
Get a mini x86 device as a wired router on which you can run any number of OSes (openwrt, debian, *sense etc.) and a separate AP (ruckus unleashed devices work well).
This guy doesn’t play by the rules!
What utter BS!
> "After that, your router will still work, but it will not receive any new software features or security updates, and performance cannot be guaranteed. You will not be able to use any Google Home app features to do things like update network settings, add devices, or run speed tests. And Google Assistant commands like “Hey Google, pause my Wi-Fi” will also not be available." [0]
It'll work, but you won't be able to control it in any way!
0 - From the email I received telling me support was ending
Speaking of BS
> Since OnHub routers were introduced 6 years ago, a lot has changed. In 2022, support for these older devices will end.
Given the devices were over spec'ed to allow for future expansion I highly doubt they're outdated already.
My router is about the same age, and with a 200Mbs dl speed and ~20 devices attached (no more than 6-8 actually in active use at the same time) everything still works fine all these years later. No one every complains when a few of us are streaming video and someone starts downloading > 20GB Steam game-- the router adjusts, streams continue, Steam uses whatever is left over, etc.
Reminds me of my Nexus Q: An extremely high quality, overspecced device, that Google deleted in order to replace the functionality with Chromecast, a drastically weaker, much poorer quality product. But hey, it sold better.
That story is not as simple as you make it sound...
<dissolve/fade to flashback>
The team was "android at home" and the year was 2012. This was google's first effort at home automation, and besides $60 lightbulbs you could turn off wirelessly that nobody at the time needed, we had the Q. The main focus for Q was audio. Fancy, high quality audio. It had a very nice amp. It even had very fancy hardware to allow synchronized audio playback without software resampling (an oscillator we could change the frequency of to pull it to master's freq). There was a second device in the works - a cheaper one, since Q was not at all cheap to make. We had a huge TV in our area of the building. And one day, on said TV, we saw the announcement of chromecast. By google. This was the first any of us heard of it. It did 90% of what our device did, but we were targeting $xxx and it was $15... At this point in time, the android and the non-android parts of google did not communicate much, and kept many secrets from each other. I doubt the folks in the chrome team even knew of our project. At google IO we took preorders for the Q, but given this new "chromecast" thing, it made no sense to continue, so everyone who pre-ordered one got one for free, and no support was ever provided, nor were any updates. In theory, the android bits for it are published and you can build android for it just fine.
Obviously that is an example of incredible corporate dysfunction. But perhaps you would know, because it always blew my mind: Is there any reason the Nexus Q couldn't have been adapted to at least... be a Chromecast? The Nexus Q's function in YouTube and such was directly replaced by the Chromecast function... and I presume processing power wasn't an issue...
It feels like if there wasn't an insurmountable incompatibility issue, the Nexus Q could've/should've been able to run alongside Chromecast as a high-end version... and probably still work today if a single "convert to Chromecast" sort of update had been developed for it.
I still have it somewhere... easily the nicest piece of hardware I ever owned, and disappointingly, the one that lasted the shortest time.
Its successor (now android tv) do have this ability. All work on q stopped at that time
Work. Now defined as simply "it will absorb power and gently warm the surface upon which it is placed."
In case anyone wants it, here's how to root a TP-Link OnHub. They're essentially glorified chromebooks, with some magic sauce on them.
https://www.exploitee.rs/index.php/Rooting_The_Google_OnHub
Dis: Googler, not near Nest/Home
A quick search suggest there's no WRT firmware for the device. That's a pity, OnHub has 1G ram and I can imaging a lot of creative usages if WRT firmware is available.
If anyone is reading this and has an OnHub they want to donate, just hit up the OpenWRT dev mailing list and offer it to existing devs. The OnHub is an ipq806x device and should be easy to support.
They can be had for 10-20 bucks on fb marketplace
It's likely expecting to boot from a custom vendor kernel, even after being placed in "developer mode" - which is probably why the "rooting" procedure is so involved. Look, I get that this has a nice amount of RAM and all, but a lot of this random IoT junk is just not worth supporting.
There's some nice bits of hardware in there. Notably, there's a Zigbee radio, so getting OpenWRT and running Home Assistant is totally a possibility.
Would rooting allow reconfiguration that Google will now be blocking through the Home app?
Yes
Thanks-- That's promising then. An easy tool to root & non-techie friendly GUI would be a great thing here. Heck, they seem like a nice piece of hardware on their spec's, I'd pickup a few on the cheap.
It's a meme now that Google doesn't support anything long term and breaks compatibility etc. all the time. Why? Because that's what's incentivized for the engineers and managers. You climb the career ladder by releasing new stuff. Supporting old stuff is a dead end careerwise. If that's the culture, this is what you get. On the whole, it does seem to work out well for them!
It's also just kind of the natural outcome of any company that has literally thousands of "product" lines. Some work, some don't, and some become less and less important to support over time for a myriad of different reasons.
Small businesses with fewer products are arguably more incentivized to ensure each product lasts long-term, but it's not uncommon to see them moving on from product to product, too. They just have far fewer in total to see "Google ends yet another product!"-esque headlines about.
monorepo culture, everyone needs to use the latest and "greatest"
Oh Google... People do not care when it was introduced - people care for support from the time when the last one got sold!
The TP-Link OnHub is still for sale on Newegg right now. I don't see how Google can control the behavior of retailers of 3rd-party hardware.
They still advertise it on their own website https://on.google.com/hub/?main=retail , so they expect it to be still selling.
From that page:
> OnHub’s software includes advanced and always-evolving security features that update automatically to help protect your network, your data, and all your devices.
LOL
Someone in Australia should report them to the ACCC for false advertising.
While it is manufactured by a third party, it's branded as a Google product.
You can't control retail inventory (well, for some products retailers report serial numbers sold, so maybe you can), but you can make relatively solid assumptions that if you shipped the units to the store/retail warehouse, they're either going to sell them or return them within some period of time, maybe 3-6 months. So assume last sale was 6 months after the last shipment.
How come smaller companies like Zyxel and Asus have solved this problem decades ago? Maybe because they support their hardware for years after they stopped producing, so the stock clears?
Do they though? Are there regular security updates for their products for every one of their models? My suspicion is they just silently stop support.
It's one thing to leave some obscure issue unpatched in a functional product, but to leave a product non-functional is such vandalism that I will avoid them like the plague.
But yes, every time i bought one of their products i had 5 years of updates, and by that time it was out of retail for years.
They don't have advertising-monopoly waterfalls of money, which affords them an attention span for things other than the care and feeding of the advertising monopoly.
> I don't see how Google can control the behavior of retailers of 3rd-party hardware.
That hardware bears trademarks that Google controls, so it's not purely a third-party product. Google may not be able to prevent retailers from selling off their remaining stock, but they should at least be able to prevent the manufacturers from sending any more to retailers, and inform retailers that the products are discontinued.
TP-Link EOL'd this thing many years ago.
They can buy the units back from retailers. It's common practice.
They can issue a recall.
> You won’t be able to update things like Wi-Fi network settings, add additional Wifi devices, or run speed tests.
Wow, I'm not familiar if users are forced to use the Google Home app, but that seems a bit drastic to stop users from even changing the most basic settings?
The dedicated apps are being discontinued across the board. I have Google mesh Wifi system and get told that "Your network was migrated to the Home app" when launching the Google Wifi app. You can continue and it still works so far. You can also use the Google Home app now if you want to manage your wifi settings with a worse UX.
Edit: Being forced to use an app is not new. If you visit your routers ip address you get a single page that links to the app for the app stores. Funny enough it still links to the Google Wifi app and not the Google Home app.
Same for the nest thermostats, the best app still works as well, and it’s nicer and feels faster (although both are slow).
"You won’t be able to update things like Wi-Fi network settings, add additional Wifi devices, or run speed tests."
Aren't they reaching into Your device to remove functionality? Isn't this vandalism, and a crime?
It’s not a crime, since the advertising includes OTA as a feature and it’s not criminal to remove functionality from a previously-sold device.
> it’s not criminal to remove functionality from a previously-sold device
I'm sure it's not criminal, given today's laws.
Think about that statement though. It absolutely should, morally, be criminal to take away something that was sold as functioning.
Imagine in the 80s that VCR manufacturers sent people to your home at night to open your VCR and cut some traces so it could play but no longer record. Would be an outrage. Also, fortunately, was in practice impossible.
Just because today devices are built to enable damaging functionality from afar doesn't means it is suddenly ok.
I never said it was OK. The parent specifically wondered if some law prohibited this practice (which there isn't, given Google's legal team surely has all their bases covered).
"It’s not a crime, since the advertising includes OTA as a feature"
My car includes free service as a feature, that doesn't mean they can take off the wheels while I sleep and call it 'service'.
Similarly I don't think any reasonable person or judge will agree bricking a device is called 'update'.
Similarly I don't think any reasonable person or judge will agree bricking a device is called 'update'.
I had a bunch of IoT lightbulbs intentionally bricked by the manufacturer. I can't remember the name of the company now. Something beginning with "F," and ending with "Electric," I think. This was back in the days before HomeKit, when IoT was even more Wild West than it is today.
I had about a dozen of the light bulbs around the house, all controlled by the company's hub, and an app on the phone. One day the company sent an e-mail stating that the system was no longer supported and would no longer function, and it also sent a forced software update to the hub, disabling everything.
I searched around the internet and found lots of people who were mad that the gear they paid for suddenly stopped functioning for no reason. Lots of speculation, but nobody ever seemed to nail down why.
That atrocious. Either this is vandalism, or we have no rights to private property any more
Or, just don’t buy “smart” devices whose software isn’t FOSS? Otherwise, you really never can be sure that you own a smart device.
'should we do something about criminals shooting random people in the street?'
'Just don't leave hone without a bulletproof vest'
There are no 'dumb' tvs left any more. Soon the same fate will befall all other devices.
I don't disagree with you. But all the same, I don't buy smart anything, if there's any viable alternative. My light switches, blinds, bed, clothing, shoes, light bulbs, toaster, etc are all dumb.
If I did buy a "smart" thing, it would have to be rootable and hackable and OSS-friendly (e.g. I need to be able to control it if the company goes belly up) or I won't buy it.
Should’ve been suspicious when I read their tagline: “We put the F in F-electric”
What about just letting the air out of the tyres?
> I'm not familiar if users are forced to use the Google Home app
Yup.
On a related note: I haven't been able to find a way to root it for OpenWRT. Does anyone know of any resource, other than the OpenWRT website, that could be helpful?
Seems some work is happening on this:
If I'm reading correctly, that page is for the newer "Google WiFi" products, which are different.
F Google.
Every time I trusted you with my money for hardware I ended up with paperweights.
They don’t even open up the protocols for products they artificially eol, you have to dump them.
Never ever again.
It is stuff like this, where they take perfectly usable hardware and turn it into a paperweight that exposes the hypocrisy of any of their pro environment/green talk. The right thing to do would be to give us the option of uploading firmware that allows us to update settings etc. after that date like is done with older routers.
On their search page they mention that they have been carbon neutral since 2007.
I had like to ask them what about the millions of perfectly usable phones that had to be ditched because of Android and the vendor lock ins.
Carbon neutral is not the same as filling the landfill with plastic and electronic waste. Just because they use solar power for energy has little to do with other environmental impacts.
The answer is carbon offsets
Whether carbon offsets actually work is another issue though
Most of them don't. Loopholes allow dxisting forests to be used to create huge amount of carbon credits without doing anything. Everyone knows but hardly anyone cares.
https://www.npr.org/2021/05/07/994774148/emission-impossible
Even if forests are planted, climate change will burn them to the ground regardless. It already is: https://www.politico.com/news/2021/07/27/wildfires-rage-carb...
Here's the secret: Androids, Chromebooks, OnHubs, etc, are all manufactured by third parties. I suspect they do not calculate the vast majority of landfilled "Google products" as part of their carbon footprint, despite being entirely responsible for when they end up getting thrown out. Just like outsourcing mistreated contractors, Google uses third party companies to shift and hide blame.
Chromebooks too. 6.5 years after the first unit is sold. So if you buy a model that's a few years old you'll only get a few years out of it.
On the bright side, Chromebooks often make great Linux devices if they have a good coreboot build available.
If anyone working on Onhub is reading this, can you please at least implement a json http api on the local network side that allows configuring the basic settings like WAN settings, DNS settings, network name and password, etc, so that the router can be kept functional for minimal case ? I don't care if you stop producing the app - but if you can implement a basic json api, I think community can easily keep it working.
I think it has such an API already. Just nobody has figured out the Auth for it. Probably a few days decompiling the API server would figure it out though.
There is a neighbouring diagnostic info endpoint that doesn't require Auth, and that works fine.
I've been doing my best to stay away google hardware for this exact reason. I mean I get that hardware can get old and be out of standards. But some of their decisions are just questionable from a consumer standpoint. I have a pixel 4a and a few 1st gen Google homes. The pixel 4a was just my way of compromising about not wanting to spend $1000 on a latest Samsung device every 2-3 years. It cost me a fraction of what I would've paid for if I had bought a Samsung android device. I'm not too worried once it stops receiving updates in couple of years. Regarding the Google Home pucks and display - most of them were either free or heavily discounted during holiday season couple years ago. But for networking, there are better consumer grade routers that will last for a long time. If anything - lot of devices allow for flashing open source firmware like tomato or DDWRT/OpenWRT to extend support long after the manufacturer has stopped providing updates.
"End support" as used in the headline apparently means turning off various cloud and smartphone dependent features, which I think includes basically all management features. Software updates (including security patches) are already stopped, so any remaining users should plan to migrate to either new hardware or an alternative OS sooner rather than later.
Doesn't surprise me. Google has trouble planning for anything longer than 1-2 OKR cycles, which nowadays means 6-12 months (previously 3-6 months). Sustainability planning and long term support just aren't in their wheelhouse as a result. In fact, anything long term planning there is a bit of a farce, including headcount planning done yearly.
The crazy thing is that they don't even need to actually support a 6 year old product: you're not getting much in the way of updates from a random netgear router that old. But Netgear isn't going to brick your device so you can't make changes and reconfigure it. All google has to do it not block it in the Home app.
The problem is that, as a product, it's just not built to be sustainable with zero effort.
The phone apps end up having to keep up with the underlying android+ios stacks' ever changing details, but even worse are the cloud services that help make the app -> router connection seamless, with the need to keep up with the ever-ongoing churn required to run binaries on Google's servers (aka "in Production").
To give an idea of how much churn is required to run binaries "in Production", there is a 6 month build horizon enforced across the company to ensure that all teams keep up with the underlying churn (changes to security, rpc, filesystems, monitoring, libc, etc). Running binaries older than that is verboten. The reasoning is that teams building the underlying components would never get a chance to upgrade / turndown down-versions/ down-compatibility.
Supporting these products means requiring staffing the role of keeping these services running from both dev+ops perspectives.
It sounds crazy but the system is designed to build "at scale" rather than to be built "sustainably". Dealing with this ever ongoing churn is the typical life of a Google engineer building "in prod". The model works well with a healthy CI/CD (albeit still a waste of time to deal with mandated churn), but falls apart quickly when staffing is removed.
>the cloud services that help make the app -> router connection seamless
an idea - "Cloud free" label for hardware similar to "GMO free" for food
Yes, 3 categories:
--Cloud free
--Cloud required
--Cloud supplemented
The last one would need to be accompanied by a list of features that depend on the cloud.
Expiration dates should also be required. "Guaranteed support for X years from original release date; Y Years from date of final official sale."
I'm not inherently against products that use or require cloud infrastructure to function, but I think consumers should have the information needed to make an informed decision.
Another one bites the dust. https://killedbygoogle.com/
Makes me think twice about relying on anything they do except google.com
Yeah, like Stadia... If Google wants to know why I won't pay for that service, it's precisely because I know Google is going to kill it soon.
GeForce now is a better model. You buy your games on diverse platforms and the subscription to run them on remote hardware separately. Your games are still there on your computer even if GeForce now is gone.
Does anybody know if Google will shut down all your accounts in retaliation if you try to enforce consumer rights laws on them?
In this case I'm thinking about the Consumer Rights Act 2015 (UK) which has a 7 year time limit for goods not fit for purpose (which a router that only lasted 2 years definitely counts as).
And they expect people to buy hardware from them in the future?
At the risk of sounding cynical, I will say that anyone buying a router from Google should have known exactly what to expect.
That was the reason I sold (for a symbolic price) my Chromecast Audio years ago, the integration was getting increasingly unreliable in Android, and I was afraid that the next step would have been to shut down its servers entirely
Maybe folks in the HN bubble of tech knowledge know this about Google, but the average consumer has no idea just how deep the Google graveyard goes.
The link « you’ll need to upgrade to a new wifi » points to a google wifi product page whose big bold tag line is
« Wi-Fi you can count on »
Oh the irony.
How many people purchased these well after their “introduction” date 6 years ago? I can imagine some people bought these 3-4 years ago. Being forced to replace them is so scummy, I will never trust Google for any sort of product.
> Since OnHub routers were introduced 6 years ago…
I’m curious, does anyone know when the product stopped being sold?
Amazon still has them on sale. Google still promotes them - https://on.google.com/hub/?main=retail
How scummy, not even a banner saying that support is ending.
It's worse than that, this ones haven't even had security patches for a while.
Let's all buy one and join a class action.
I think you should habe a valid claim, if you buy a new device you still have warranty and to have a device disabled during warranty preiod is unprecedented.
Your beef would be with the retailer, not with Google. It is the retailer who makes the implied warranty of suitability for purpose, not the manufacturer (who also, in this case, is not Google).
Google just told me "OnHub regularly updates its software with the newest features, so it never stops working well." (emphasis added)
Google presumably financially benefits from me buying it's products.
I'd be shocked if there wasn't a valid fraud claim here (assuming I had recently purchased a device without being aware of the end of support).
This isn't just a question of warranty, it's a question of lying for financial benefit.
That's not accurate, at least in the United States. Product warranties are issued by manufacturers, and Google's pages for TP-Link[1] and Asus[2] confirm this.
The manufacturer warranty is 2 years for both the TP-Link[3] and Asus[4] OnHub models.
If there were a class action, it would be against TP-Link and Asus. These manufacturers would then take the losses into consideration before collaborating with Google in the future.
[1] https://support.google.com/product-documentation/answer/6279...
[2] https://support.google.com/product-documentation/answer/6314...
[3] https://www.bestbuy.com/site/tp-link-google-onhub-ac1900-dua...
[4] https://www.bestbuy.com/site/asus-onhub-wireless-ac-router-w...
Those are not implied warrantees. Please read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implied_warranty
Yes, maufacturer warranties are not implied warranties. They are explicit promises from the manufacturer to repair or replace products that fall below certain standards within a period of time.
For example, the TP-Link limited warranty explicitly identifies TP-Link USA Corp. as the warrantor:
> TP-Link USA Corp. (“TP-Link USA”) provides a limited warranty on all eligible TP-Link products purchased in the United States.
You can still buy the TP-Link one new on Amazon
https://www.amazon.com/Google-WiFi-Router-TP-Link-Managed/dp...
I think it was 2018, because that's when I was looking for a way to install OpenWRT on it.
Looks like some interesting hardware for ~$60 at the bookstore. Generous RAM and flash, bluetooth and zigbee. Sibling comment has the root instructions.
https://www.smallnetbuilder.com/wireless/wireless-reviews/32...
It's a great device and functions flawlessly with a large number of connected clients. I have installed at least a dozen of these for various family members.
I could see them doing this if they hadn’t already migrated the OnHub devices to the new google home app that controls the new Nest WiFi devices. It’s not like the control plane is going away here - the hard work of migrating to their new cloud has already been done.
Google reassured that onhub will not face any issues since they will commit to long term support of the device.
Which is hilarious because of course they didn't. They never do. How many times does Google have to fuck their hardware customers before people wise up? This isn't even the first time Google has done this explicitly to force customers to buy into the Nest ecosystem. Remember when they bought Revolv and then bricked all their $300 smart home hubs to force people to buy Nest hubs instead? Anyone who trusts Google not to drop them the very instant it becomes profitable to do so is a damn fool.
This bodes well for their flailing cloud gaming service, Stadia.
Pretty much why I won't be subscribing to any game streaming service unless/until they let me bring my own library of Steam & GOG games.
Okay, seeing this news and the fact that that onhub page is still up on google's site, I'm certainly not going to get a google nest (and I literally had them in my basket in google store). I understand retiring without much notice of free for users websites/services, but retiring hardware is IMO a different thing...
And here I am with my 10+ years old Mikrotik router, still receiving frequent updates and new functionality.
I had to take down my onhub this weekend, it was my primary router and my network kept dropping, it was part of a google wifi mesh and now one of the wifi points has taken over. Something feels like suspect. Was working fine for 2 years in this config
When a company stops supporting the product, should they release source code so community can support it? If it turns out the product is unsafe through unfixed security holes should you be able to get a refund?
Maybe.. OnHub has a command-and-control network in the cloud, with which you interact using the Home (formerly: Wifi) app on your mobile. I guess they are ending support for OnHub control protocols in the cloud. So you'd need to replace the software in the router such that it could be controlled some other way.
Right; personally I'd be quite happy if the EOL process was "here's all the needed source code to build a kernel and trivial userland, and steps to build and flash a firmware image that boots a busybox shell but doesn't have our management binaries" and then let the community do whatever they want (since that's basically what you want in order to repurpose the thing or build OpenWRT for it).
They should already provide sources for all the GPL licensed bits to be compliant - build scripts and bootloader keys are usually the biggest problem.
Abstractly bogus, but on a rational analysis my TP-Link OnHub has already lasted wayyyyyyy longer than any other access point I've ever owned. Its predecessor, an ASUS RT-N66U, lasted barely two years.
The Asus RT-N66U was released on December 22, 2011 according to Amazon,[1] and the last official firmware update was on June 18, 2020.[2] That's 8.5 years of support (assuming no future updates) compared to the OnHub's 7-7.5 years.
More importantly, the Asus RT-N66U is still fully functional and still supported on the Asus Router mobile app.[3] Unlike OnHub, Asus routers that run on non-Google firmware have a web interface so the network settings will continue to be adjustable even after app support ends.
Older Asus routers, including the RT-N66U, tend to be supported by open source firmware like DD-WRT.[4] OnHub is not.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B006QB1RPY
[2] https://www.asus.com/supportonly/rtn66u_(verb1)/HelpDesk_Dow...
[3] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.asus.aihom...
[4] https://forum.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Supported_devices#As...
The N66U was basically a collection of shrink-wrapped CVEs and only a lunatic would allow it on their network. Mine burst into flames.
I'm not sure that it says anything good about Google that they built a solid piece of hardware only to purposely brick it for users after it worked well for too long.
Imagine how much longer it could've laster if Google wasn't about to remotely brick it.
Are these running the same OS and software as the Nest/Google Wifi routers? If yes, then I'm not sure why Google couldn't at least support them in terms of security patches.
Why wouldn't they still let it be manageable in the app? Not providing additional updates is one thing, but essentially bricking the device is absolutely not necessary.
I'm almost degoogled... except for Recaptcha, and my Pixel phone with LineageOS...
Is that another company that they purchased and crushed?
No, OnHub (and then Google WiFi) was developed by Google, not acquired.
Source: I worked on the team (iOS app) for the first two or three years.
Killed by Google, hardware edition.