"custom" routers for VPN - useful or waste of money?
- by Andrew Heath
I use VPN in China and my current service contract expires soon so I was checking what sort of plans are out there now. I found that Witopia offers a "Cloak Box", what appears to be a Linksys wireless router with allegedly hacked/custom firmware to support VPN.
Aside from allowing multiple computers to share one VPN connection, is there anything else at work here to justify that price when most new routers are $100 or less these days?
Or is this something targeted towards the cd-rom cupholder crowd?
And yes, I've contacted them, but haven't heard back yet...
EDIT
I've heard back from the company - here are the details if anyone else is interested:
the router is a Linksys WRT54GL running TomatoVPN custom firmware
the hardware waranty is one (1) year, from Linksys/Cisco
the VPN is hard-set, so any device connected to the router MUST use the VPN (Witopia blocks torrents)
I've decided it's not for me, but hopefully this information will prove useful to others.