Domestic SOHO devices, is it real?

When faced with the squiggle of Taiwanese manufacturers of SOHO devices of different directions, whether they are routers or print servers, one natural question arises? Until the manufacturers of consumer devices will shift the responsibility for errors in their products from themselves to the user? I think you have repeatedly come across the fact that for some reason the promised VPN does not work in your home router, and it receives DHCP by luck.

Moreover, modified versions of firmware for devices from the Open Source community are often more stable and more functional than factory counterparts. There is no need to go far for examples, these are both DD-WRT , and OpenWRT, and many other examples .

I think it’s obvious why DLinks, TP-Links and other “masterpieces” of engineering are so popular in our country. It is not because of its functionality, but because it is cheap and the price / quality ratio is better than that of competitors (mainly due to the price of course :)).

Watching how people continue to collect home routers, NAS servers and other homemade products, the question arises. Why the production of such SOHO devices, I must say not the most high-tech, is not established with us. In a country that has long been famous for its bright heads and engineering minds? Or is it polished web2.0 startups with blackjack and whores eclipsed the mind? In fact, we continue to consume imported products, continuing to sponsor foreign economies, instead of developing production in our country.
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For example, take the iron startup Myka BitTorrent (which, by the way, has not yet found a venture). In fact, all the “goodies” of this piece of iron are realized with the help of one single System-on-Chip BCM7403 .



This SoC has the following capabilities:

• H.264 hardware decoding; VC-1; HD MPEG-2 / SD MPEG-2; DivX 3.11 / 4.11 / 5.x; MPEG-4.
• Hardware decoding AAC LC; Dolby Digital (+), MPEG 1/2/3; Windows Media Audio.
• A pair of built-in HD DAC.
• S / PDIF output.
• Supports up to two I2S audio codecs.
• 300 MHz MIPS32 processor.
• SATA interface.
• Integrated Ethernet MAC and PHY.
• Integrated USB controller.
• SMART CARD support.

Minimum binding + 2 audio codec, and we have a home media center. If we add BCM4322 to this bundle , we get WiFi support.

BCM3368 , a pair of demodulators, minimal piping (DRAM, NAND Flash) and DOCSIS modem with VoIP functionality ready.

And there are a lot of such examples. Modern SoC absorb all the necessary functionality. The reference design of the boards and the entire circuitry is provided by the chip manufacturer. The price of such chips in large quantities does not exceed 10-15, occasionally $ 25.

As an example, the full-scale Marvell SheevePlug platform is completely Open Source, and all the circuits and layers of the PCB are available to anyone.

Not sure yet? Let's look at the Time Capsule from everyone's favorite Apple:

• WiFi AP is implemented on Marvell 88W8363
• SoC Marvell 88F5BF01 C500 500Mhz, based on ARM9. Includes USB, Ethernet, SATA controllers, dual-channel memory controller support, and PCI-E. This beauty is used on most NAS.
• 16 megabytes flash on Spansion S29GL128N11TF101 chip.
• 2 DDR2 667 Qimonda chips with a total capacity of 128 MB.
• 5 port gigabit switch BCM5395 .

That's all street magic :) Of course, everything is not as simple as it may turn out and also requires funding, but nothing is impossible. And the money for which mail.ru acquired smaper (about 2 million cu), and a year of operation, would be enough to bring 2-3 products to the market.

Update: I have no goal to argue, or to convince everyone in this thread about the feasibility of placing the production / development of these devices in Russia. First of all, I myself am interested in the question of what to do to make such devices become a reality.