Pre-order Kyocera's KR1 EV-DO router

Well, Kyocera's KR1 EV-DO router didn't come in quite as cheap as everyone had been hoping, but $250 (after $50 mail in rebate with purchase of a Kyocera EV-DO card, of course) for an EV-DO WiFi router isn't really anything to snuff at, especially compared to what the other guys are asking for some of theirs. Of course, the KR1 is already backordered though, so between the pre-order and the short supply, you may well have to continue on with your wait for this box (or turn your attention to a Junxion Box or some such other EV-DO router).

[Thanks, Dave]

[parrainsweb @ Feb 1st 2006 2:28PM]

A must !

[parrainsweb @ Feb 1st 2006 2:32PM]

A must !

[GadgetDragon @ Feb 1st 2006 2:33PM]

Aww, no mention of the do-it-yourself systems, like the stompbox? :) http://www.stompboxnetworks.com

[grey @ Feb 1st 2006 2:35PM]

Actually I've got a project at work that requires something like this. After futzing with the stompbox CF image (outdated & somewhat broken; I've been using soekris boxes for 3+ years and this is crap) and being frustrated with the cost of the junxion (basically a commercial stompbox, still linux on the inside) since I owned all the frigging hardware already, I decided to find out when the Dlink or the a were available. The box from evdo coverage seems pretty nice (running vxworks, and can run two evdo cards at the same time for increased bandwidth?) but is even more than the junxion, and again, I own the hardware to DIY but just lost patience. On Monday (I got assigned this task on Thursday and wasted most of Friday with stompbox, pebble l00n1x, etc. though I did get it working [slowly] on OpenBSD) called up Dlink & Kyocera sales to see when their routers would be shipping. Dlink said not until Q2, meanwhile Kyocera said "Well it's not on our website yet, but just a few minutes ago we put it for sale, can I transfer you to our order department?" I said sure - they said it would be backordered, and they weren't shipping units until later in the week, but I said wtf I need this by the 8th so overnight it to me when you send it as it was only $15 (two day or whatever was $8, so it wasn't a big deal).

Well, I went back to the soekris 4521 and had some limited success with pfsense and some failures with some other linux distro attempts but figured I'd keep hammering, and maybe order a junxion just to get shit done since I need ipsec support too, and no other devices offer that built in.

Tuesday morning, the kyocera was sitting on my desk!? So much for being shipped later in the week & being on backorder. I fired it up, tested with an audiovox 5740, worked fine, tested with an audiovox 5220, worked fine (needed to be rebooted a couple times/turn off/on the wireless AP part for whatever reason before it took) and then plopped in the kyocera 650 card - which... WORKED BEFORE I ENTERED IN THE PHONE #/auth information? WTF?! I need to look into that more, but umm, nice? Changed the settings just to be sure, rebooted, still worked.

I tried with the usbphone port as well, both with an Audiovox vx6600, and a Samsung i730 - the vx6600 was properly recognized in the status tab, while the i730 just had a generic "EVDO 3G" statement (similar to the audiovox 5740 when pluggedin). I couldn't get either phone to work but will experiment more today. A coworker also has a treo 700w which I will give a shot, it would be neat to get the evdophone through usb port working, maybe my daughter's motorola i815 (or was that i835? I forget now). Anyway, I'll experiment more later.

A couple things: this is pretty cheap/affordable. $299+tax+s&h came out under $340. Junxion starts @ $599 (in fact I ended up ordering one yesterday, their 3rd party reseller [wtf do they need that?] charged $50 for overnight, and it's still not here a day later). Out of the box, it took me about two minutes to get working before locking down - so that was nice.

It comes with a cigarette lighter adapter in addition to a power supply - NICE TOUCH! ;) For fun last night I fired up my laptop in the car, plugged it in and started a ping. For the 30 minute drive, it never dropped, even in some spots where voice dies (but then this is EVDO not EVDV, so yeah data > voice coverage I guess). Latency is what it is with evdo, over 100ms, usually 300-500ms, and when driving I got some crazy 6000+ms replies, but it never dropped! ;) 60+KB/s average though I've gotten some tests over 100KB/s, and some lower.

One other thing that's odd - the IPSec passthrough doesn't seem to work out of the box (using a Cisco VPN Client) it's configured by default, but I can't seem to get it to work. Instead I used the Cisco VPN client & set it to use port 10000 over TCP instead of 500 [for ipsec] and no issues. This is a bit annoying, because the only way to specify firewall rules per port is to set a specific LAN/dmz IP address, so that will only work for a single machine, not each machine statefully behind the NAT. Ah well, Anyway, got up and running with a Cisco 3002 building an IPsec tunnel (again over port 10000 TCP, though since that's a device level, I could just do a single IP to the 3002 and try a tcp/udp port 500 redirection and see how it works) and ta-da wireless device level VPN back to a 3020 cisco/altiga concentrator! Which is what I need for work by next week. (one of our jobsites is dropping a trailer right in the middle of a clover leaf so getting phone wiring there before they've even moved when there's no physical address isn't possible).

Let's see, what else about the unit? I'm still going to check out a junxion - since it has built in ipsec, obviating the need for the 3002. Additionally, given my configuration setup, using the built in 802.11g of the KR1 isn't feasible since that would be untunneled straight internet access which I don't want for our corporate users. Kind of a bummer. :-/ If time weren't such a concern I'd dork around with pfsense & OpenBSD some more to DIY a similar functionality device, and I expect I will at leisure, but right now I just needed something working. The KR1 certainly helps me fit that bill quickly and cheaply.

But, if you need ipsec - junxion still has a minor niche, in the meantime I think that KR1 will eat their lunch for the most part.

Oh, the Kyocera is the SAME as the Dlink 725. It even says "Powered by Dlink" on the front, and the support base says for support contact dlink. Kind of interesting, my guess is Dlink isn't shipping until Q2 due to this partnership, so that Kyocera gets exclusive shipping for a couple months for people who need something like this NOW (like me/my company) and then dlink can inch in afterwards as price points drop.

My guess is this is running some embedded linux similar to OpenWRT stuff given all the commonalities with other Dlink boxes that do. I haven't popped it open, but it's probably some ARM7 SoC like the rest (if only *BSD's could run on MMU-less devices like these so we didn't have to deal with linux cruft). I suppose it could be vxworks, but I doubt it. EVDO performance on the KR1 seems a -little- slower than just native Windows XP, possibly due to the little SoC being underpowered? But I haven't tested more than a day, so this may just be bad timing/signal strength of EVDO at the time [since it is shared bandwidth, though I don't thin kthat's much of an issue where I am now, where the cloverleaf [neer MS & google in Mountain view] I am worried about geek evdo saturation though.

OK, wrote way too much, but this has been occupying my job heavily since I got this assignment on Thursday, and I've still got some other products to try out. So far though, I'm very impressed with the KR1!

-grey
Network Security Specialist
undeadly.org
(these are my own words, and don't reflect my [unnamed]company, etc.)

[Netwerk Secuirty Expurt @ Feb 1st 2006 3:03PM]

I lkie to type alot of werds to

[W @ Feb 1st 2006 3:14PM]

I can't see this being THAT useful. EV-DO isn't really to the point yet where it should be shared I don't feel. I still see many times with my card where I'm lucky to get 150k/s. I don't know about you but I don't like sharing 150k/s. A year from now the tech may be more useful.

[abbot @ Feb 1st 2006 3:16PM]

if all kyocera products are of the same quality as their cell phones, stay far away. my company sells them and i'm sick of getting their crappy products returned on a daily basis.

[Jonathan Graft @ Feb 1st 2006 3:47PM]

What is EV-DO? Is it a supped up Wireless G router? Is it the 'next gen' of wireless routers? I thought the next good wireless was going to be Wireless N and wasn't expected til the end of this year? Me confused...I'm still wired and I need a router that supports B!

[grey @ Feb 1st 2006 3:57PM]

I just popped the box open and took some pictures, the macro on the
camera I'm using at work is crap, so some are a bit blurry. Not much user interchangeable - just cardbus & minipci. Looks like there are some headers for serial ports and the like though, that could come in
handy. The bottom of the pcb is pretty barren, but I took a pic nonetheless.

Dumped them on a friend's shell at the moment,
not recompressed or anything so they're a bit large:
http://grey.unixfu.net/pics/kyocerakr1


W: 100-150KBytes/s is comparable to a DSL line and lots of people share those. ;) That said, this has quite a bit more latency, DSL would definitely be preferable (and I often make use of cisco 837 series
DSL modems to act as lan-to-lan IPSec tunnel endpoints, where we can get DSL service to a temporary job trailer). However, there are some circumstances - such as the one I'm dealing with now, where getting a physical wired connection just isn't feasible. For the time being, EVDO is going to be the highest speed low cost option. Hopefully in coming year WiMax/802.16(and 802.16e) will be faster, longer range and cheaper. But for now I can't think of a faster or cheaper way to do this.

I'll probably still end up using the junxion (if it arrives in time) for the site due to the ipsec requirement and not having much time to burn on DIY, and it just being cleaner solution (a one box instead of two), but the KR1 I could see as being very useful for many people who may be moving around frequently and can't get DSL or cable, or don't want to deal with the order+setup times entailed with that.

GadgetDragon: Mentioning stompbox I don't think makes much sense, honestly. A. It's not a commercial product you can buy. B. The components to build one (including wireless card, CF card, power supply) add up to about the same, if not more than the KR1. Admittedly, I

[Chris @ Feb 1st 2006 4:59PM]

This plus Citrix/thin client == teh win for us who have to support mobile users

[grey @ Feb 1st 2006 6:17PM]

Ungh, the engadget comment system is pretty cumbersome, it botched my last posting somewhat thoroughly, and broke the link to the pics of the kr1's innards.

Googling the silkscreen part #'s, looks like this is running a realtek mips (RTL8561B, so it actually has an MMU), not arm for its SoC.

Anyway, fixed link to the popped open router here:
http://grey.unixfu.net/pics/kyocerakr1/

nmap scan only turns up port 80 as being open (no telnetd/sshd) so as far as getting much more inside this currently probably best bet is to try to wire up the apparent console headers and see if one is set to be a serial console.

nmap output here:
greys-powerbook-g4-12:~ grey$ sudo nmap -O 192.168.0.1

Starting Nmap 3.95 ( http://www.insecure.org/nmap/ ) at 2006-02-01 15:12 PST
Interesting ports on 192.168.0.1:
(The 1669 ports scanned but not shown below are in state: closed)
PORT STATE SERVICE
80/tcp open http
MAC Address: 00:15:E9:72:55:90 (Unknown)
Device type: general purpose
Running: Linux 2.4.X|2.5.X
OS details: Linux 2.4.0 - 2.5.20
Uptime 0.014 days (since Wed Feb 1 14:52:07 2006)

Nmap finished: 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 4.470 seconds

Johnathan: evdo is a highspeed wireless subscription service offered by some CDMA cellular carriers. For GSM carriers, some (currently cingular) are beginning to roll out HSDPA which is also high speed (supposedly up to about 10Mbps). As far as 802.11G, yes this is also a wireless access point, and 802.11G is backwards compatible with 802.11b. The EVDO card is simply for the WAN interface instead of say, DSL or a cable modem connection. Supposedly this can work with hsdpa cards as well, though I have none. It's got settings for '2g' (gprs?) connections too, but again I have none to test.

[grey @ Feb 1st 2006 6:24PM]

Argh, still breaking that link, last try I give up:
http://grey.unixfu.net/pics/kyocerakr1

[EVDO guy @ Feb 1st 2006 9:58PM]

If you haven't read about the KR1, we have a full review and forums dedicated to it on our web site.

[Q @ Aug 17th 2006 11:18AM]

Hello,
Any updates on the usage of this KR1 with a USB connection via a mobile phone? I am curious on that method for one of my project. Any update, hints, or links would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

[alex @ May 14th 2007 7:23PM]

For those of you interested in the KR1 EVDO Router... there is now a new GPS Module available that provides RealTime GPS tracking.

Read much more at this webpage:

http://www.evdoinfo.com/content/view/1987/64/