Turris Mox Advantages

General discussion
1

Hi,

First of all, to all the people involved in the turris project, a huge thank you for all your efforts and work! I just learned about turris mox and as a 2gb ram omnia owner (indiegogo backer), I was just wondering what is the selling point/advantage of the mox router to an omnia owner, apart from the modularity. The super early bird perk for omnia users is a turris mox as a wireless coverage extender, but turris omnia already has a very good wireless coverage, and as a wireless extender, it’s a bit expensive. The super early bird perk plus the shipping is almost half the price of the indiegogo campaign omnia, with the other modules how expensive will it be? The omnia is already very modular, compared to other routers, we can already buy more powerful wireless cards to extend coverage, and maybe in the future it will support cards with new generation wifi tecnology with better speeds and coverage. The detachable external antennas are also easily upgradable when compared to internal antennas, I upgraded mine with Linksys WRT004ANT-EU High Gain Antennas. I know there are people with HUGE houses that will want the mox even though there are cheaper wifi extenders, but for someone that has an omnia and has no problems with wifi coverage, what is the selling point/advantage of backing the super early bird perk? I will back the campaing when it starts next week because I’m a huge fan of your work and I think open source and open hardware projects like yours are very important, awesome and worth supporting, but I think this time I’ll back it with a perk like the t-shirt, stickers or posters, if they are available as in the last campaign… If I didn’t have an omnia I would consider buying a mox, but right now, with the information and specs available I simply can’t find it useful (for me personally), especially with this price tag. Maybe someone involved in the project can share their own perspective about the mox and change my mind =P (PLEASE CHANGE MY MIND, I really want to support you by buying one but I simply can’t justify it). Sorry for the very long post…

1 Like
2

Well, if you have Omnia and small house than the early perk is probably not for you. Few usecases I personally see:

  • extender that has regular updates, open system and can for example serve also as a little bit geographically detached backup NAS (USB3) - if there is a small fire near your Omnia and it doesn’t spread out of the room, then you can have backup
  • with ethernet ports - manageable switch that can use to do some prefiltering before taking VLAN trunk to Omnia to cut some stuff out early and save bandwith in trunk

Obviously, the main usecase for this is for people that don’t have Omnia mostly because of the high price. If they don’t need everything Omnia has, they could get something cheaper and yet open and secure. Like Mac users don’t need ethernet switch, plenty of people don’t need SFP, some people don’t need 2.4GHz WiFi. Also just a core module without WiFi is a good start to building a NAS.

1 Like
3

Really, I wouldn’t buy MOX beause of price. The full price of MOX module A with shipping is 3500Kč and required ethernet swith module would cost at least another 2000Kč. For such price I could buy mutch better and fully supported devices such as Synology one. Synology has excelent support, they have features you are dreaming of now and theri updates are reliable and they react immediately on any security threat. See Synology router OS management possibilities https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EfOlVaGT_LA

4

Synology Router OS looks great but have you read reviews for 1900ac model? Wireless performance sucks (but MOX won’t be better with internal antennas on base module card I’m afraid) and so does USB transfers. And if you enable traffic monitoring and other features OS won’t be so swift because RAM and CPU are even worse than on MOX.

I would be happy if the price was lower but if I look at routers on market it’s probably not possible (but the final price - 129$ w/o VAT - of base module is still pretty high)

1 Like
5

Well, depends on what you want, I appreciate much more the openness and hackability than shiny UI :wink:

6

Your team is targeting houshold users and you must provide them good UI. And Synology isn’t only shining interface. Their products are very reliable. I use their diskstation DS213+ for 5 years with automatic updates on and I had never any problem with it. I can’t say the same about Omnia…

7

But bit of “shines” is IMHO only possibility how to bring security to the masses. Although even the most secure and shiny router will fail in hands of user that doesn’t know what is doing of course

EDIT: And best would be if you have someone in team that doesn’t look only on what developers think is best for them (and automatically assume that’s also best for other users that way) - no offense meant.

2 Likes
8

Well, we provide also nice and functional UI, but without shiny effects, I agree. We have well covered use case for experienced users where Foris guides them through the basic functionality well and even provides them with some advance features in similarly simple and understandable way and then we have plenty of features of advanced users that are not scared of terminal. We need to improve in the area of experienced users (and we are working on it and thanks to the updates, even our first routers still get all the latest innovation). Experienced users that want to do advance stuff but at the same time are scared of LuCI or terminal. And we prefer to focus on this area over the shiny effects.

9

Thank you for your reply,

I really hope you guys succeed because I believe in what you are doing and trying to accomplish, but right now with the info that there’s out there, it’s simply not for me, sorry =|… No doubt I will be backing this campaign with something, just don’t know what, maybe one of the expansion boards will do something so amazing I will just change my mind =). Regarding the fist usecase, I know the mox isn’t a competitor to the rpi, but in this case, I think the rpi might be a competitor to the mox, because you can build a nas whith a rpi, maybe not as good or reliable as the mox, but for a lot less money and it’s still open and hackable. The second usecase I don’t understand what you are talking about, my bad… sorry for that, but I’m sure you are right. You guys really had a winner with the omnia, it’s an amazing beast, if this was a smaller version of the omnia to extend the range and capabilities of the omnia, or maybe even for people who think the omnia is too much, than I think you would have a winner too. I understand the concept is modularity but I think, at least right now, maybe you stripped too much for the sake of modularity and the price is a little high. If you had a smaller omnia, without SFP, with internal antennas, plastic case, slower cpu, less ram, less flash, less mPCIe, less USB, 3 or 4 ethernet switches instead of 5, just smaller “companions” to the omnia not as barebones as this, I think I would be on board with that, if the price was right. The omnia right now sells for about 300€, a 100€ or 150€ smaller brother of the omnia would be awesome, maybe even different versions of it. I think the omnia with pin headers with GPIO, I²C, SPI, mPCIe, 2 USB 3.0 is already very hackable and extensible. Before finding and buying the omnia I was just looking for a small and cheap router I could flash with openwrt, so are a lot of people, and I was thrilled to find a project like yours and just had to back it up, it was just too good! Again, best of luck to your campaign, I really hope you guys can make it, I will back it with a smaller perk and I’m sure I’ll back some other projects from you in the future.

10

Well RPi sucks as NAS as it doesn’t have real network and reasonable way to attach harddrive. Regarding options, wait for the final options and pricing when campain really starts :wink:

2 Likes
11

well that sums it up perfectly.
as a super happy omnia backer i have zero interest in the mox concept. i backed omnia because of it’s stellar performance at a cheap price, plus turris os/foris. (at $190 + shipping (no wifi, 2GB ram), there was & is no 1gbps routing capable router with lxc & sfp capability & lts firmware for anywhere near this price on the market)

as for an AP, already bought an unifi-ap-ac-pro with my omnia (and still would today)
so, as much as i love open source & hardware, with an AP invisible design is paramount. (there is a reason basically all enterprise APs are flat/small & white)

so while the concept is certainly cool, the $99 wired & fiber options compared to the omnia seem rather pricey. as does the wifi options when comparing them with the unifi ap ac pro. i also don’t understand why splurge on a NVMe disk in a NAS? (a 1TB M.2 sata or msata ssd is ~$250 + ~99 for mox AB would be bigger & cheaper, not to mention one with mpcie to 4x sata & a 4 hdds, that would even allow for zfs with true data safety)… oh and weirdly there is zero info on the specs (SOC, ram, embedded storage, dimensions, GPIO, …) on the indiegogo page or via link.

so i wish you all the best, but no thanks.

however if the turris os/foris would run and be supported on the macciattobin (or a similar design from turris) i’d instantly raid my wallet for up to $400…

12

Major disadvantage of every Turris concept is lack of xDSL support (or SFP/DSL). This makes it non attractive for rest of the people, who likes such router ideas.

13

@jrompf At additional cost there are those http://www.allnet.de/en/allnet-brand/produkte/switches/switches-fiber-module/p/-0c35cc9ea9/

14

But nobody knows if it works with Turris. If I remember correctly there is thread here where someone bought similar but failed to work it out.

1 Like
15

The stream of today’s press conference is here

1 Like
16

It was horrible experience: simultaneous czech and english translation was unbearable - why there was not any posibility to choose original or translated version?!? English was more loud than czech :frowning: and even I (maybe wrongly I suppose I’m quite fluent in english) I would prefer in this case to hear it in czech origin! It’s a pitty.

4 Likes
17

thanks, sheds some light on the hardware, seems nice, especially the price for 2 modules @29 each… hell even 3 might make sense, however in that case, i don’t think saving $42 (compared to omnia’s igg price) is worth missing the features/futureproofing of a full omnia (incl. case), except for bulk installations.

planned modules sound cool, just wonder if the expansion bus is capable enough…

18

That particular device works with the TO. This is of course subject to the (A/V)DSL standards adhered to/supported by the ISP.

Certainly it might be more convenient if the MOX would feature a such modem already built-in, but then it would increase the cost and thus the price and people may back away, considering that the majority would be furnished with a DSL modem from their ISP anyway.

And if such modem was built-in and the ISP would not adhere to DSL standards, which is not that uncommon, then users may want to return their Mox and/or blame the Mox team for the incompatibility, in short it could be bag of headache.

With the current modularity the user can decide whether to invest in such DSL modem via the Mox’s SFP port/module.

19

The problem with the MOX (as it is currently) is that you have to choose between DSL via SFP and switch as you can’t have both :confused: . I see the pinout of the extension port carries an serdes lane which isn’t used by any module yet. It might be possible to use that for an SFP.

20

with Turris MOX E (Super Ethernet) it’s possible. :slight_smile:

2 Likes