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All of us at EchoDitto are big fans of the FON project — we run a FON access point here at the office, and I run one at home even though my primary router is a much-more-capable WRT54G running an old version of the Sveasoft Linux firmware. I got my Fonera router from Phil, so I assume he's running a FON AP, too. We're trying to support the project — honest!

I say all this out of guilt. Last night I hacked a Fonera. I know, I know — they sell these things for next to nothing only so that they'll get distributed and the project will grow. But I don't have any more WAN pipes available to share! So I hope the project's sponsors will forgive me for succumbing to the siren song of $10 Fonera routers on eBay. I couldn't help myself from checking out what a spare unit can do.

"Kind of a lot" turns out to be the answer. The La Fonera is based on the Atheros chipset, which is found in a number of other commercial routers and supported by both the DD-WRT and OpenWRT firmware projects.

Sveasoft kicked off the custom router firmware scene, but the author's controversial attitude toward the GPL made them fall out of favor rather quickly. Besides, truly open efforts quickly outpaced the project. OpenWRT is the king of functionality, but also the most intimidating — they seem to have a general "GUIs are for chumps" sort of attitude. While I aspire to similar levels of snobbery, I'm more comfortable sticking with projects that have support forums filled with posts that are comprehensible to someone just getting started with the project.

Besides, I've had great luck with DD-WRT in the past, using it to successfully repeat a neighbor's faint wifi signal through my girlfriend's apartment (with permission, of course — but without having to do anything to his router, i.e. no WDS).