CPE custom build

[titan_wireless]

All,

Does anyone know someplace that will make CPE's to your specs? I know the WRAP board would work but was looking into other options? Do you think if you called Linksys they would sell you the boards without the shell?

Thanks,
TW

[tbutcher]

I would love some cheap boards that don't have the shell but don't know anybody who could supply them. WRAP boards are still too expensive for home users, something less than £40 pounds would be great.

Tim

[georgew]

The reason the wrap boards exist is because there are no other options. If someone could buy a bulk order of linksys radios and convert them, it would have already been done.

There are plenty of engineering firms that will design something like the wrap board for you. However to make that cost effective, you will need to order about 5000 radios on your first order. If you don't have a quarter million $ to spend on the development of your own system, then the wrap boards are a ready made answer you can buy today.

If you make your own, you will probably be able to get the price $50 below that of the wrap board. But that $50 will cost you on the front end.

Probably a cheaper way to go would be to pay pascal to give you a custom wrap design that you can make on your own.

The point is that thousands of people came years before you asking the same question, and the wrap board materialized to answer that need. The wrap /is/ the custom board designed for us.

As for costs, the cheap equipment you see in the store is a mirrage. The reason it is cheap is because they left out a lot of parts that ISP's will need.

As for buying parts from linksys/cisco, they don't make the parts, they are resellers of most of the cheaper parts. The only thing that linksys designed in-house is the plastic box, the part you don't want. You can already go to the chip makers yourself and have them make something for you. Just don't expect to get away without paying the salaries of 20 engineers for 6 months.

I know the prices are too high, but it's because the costs are too high. The prices will come down as they always do, eventually.

Part of the problem is the cheap stuff is usually missing things like memory and cpu. As soon as you put enough memory and cpu in a box, you have made a pc, and pc's are hard to make for $50 retail. StarOS runs on a pc. THAT is the issue. Every feature makes staros larger, not smaller.

This is a tough proble, and everyone reading this has asked the same questions you have. Cheap used pc's and the wrap board are the kinds of solutions people are finding. The only really cheap things are the bridging clients, and IMHO they are not good enough.