Alex and Brandon Jones have their 11-year-old brother to thank for the Soap router, a project that aims to take the pain out of that old familiar task: setting up a Wi-Fi network.
A year ago, their brother was hooked on the first person shooter game, Battlefield Heroes, and he was racking up big, unauthorized bills purchasing in-game add-ons. Mom and dad wanted this to stop, so Alex wrote a little program that could tap into their Wi-Fi home router and let them block the game. The trouble was that his non-techie Jones parents said the program was too hard to use. "They thought it was miserable," Alex remembers.
>Home routers are too hard to use. Most people configure them once and then forget about them for the rest of their lives.
So the Jones brothers set about building their own router. They envision it as a $200 Android device that you tap and touch to configure. They see it as an easy to user central nervous system for home automation. The router will have security and parental monitoring tools, but it will also be a central point of interface for smart devices--lights, garage doors, or locks at home.
It's an interesting idea. There's no doubt that home routers are too hard to use. Most people configure them once and then forget about them for the rest of their lives, meaning that they don't get any updates and any useful security features that they might ship with are often overlooked. But can two twentysomething entrepreneurs with a dream really reinvent the home router in a useful way? Is Android really the right kind of rock-solid operating system that you need for a router?
The project has its skeptics. Earlier this year, the Jones brothers launched a Kickstarter campaign, looking to raise $80,000 in seed money to develop the prototype and deliver the first working versions of their system. Within weeks, there was a internet backlash. Critics pointed out that one of the early design documents that the Jones brothers used had been lifted from another site, and they started questioning some of the projects technical claims.
One of the project's most vocal critics, Hackaday writer Brian Benchoff, says that the initial Soap proposal was so vague that it looked like a scam. Kickstarter itself, pulled the project for more than a week, before allowing them to resume, and to this day, Soap's comment section is littered with skeptical comments.
Benchoff has since revised his opinion. "I don't think the SOAP router guys were actually trying to scam people," he says. But he thinks that they're still going to have an extremely tough time meeting the technical challenges ahead of them in a timely fashion, and he points out that there's already a $100 touchscreen Wi-Fi router on the market, called Almond. "They just launched their Kickstarter about a year before they should have."
Undeterred by such criticism, Alex Jones is pushing ahead with the project. Even though funding stalled after the project was temporarily yanked from Kickstarter, it eventually raised $140,000. And today, he and his brother are reviving their fundraising -- this time they're looking for another $42,500 with a 60 day Indiegogo campaign. That should give them a large enough router order to get volume discounts from their parts manufacturers, Jones says.
This time, they're hoping that there are enough technical details on the project to keep silence the critics, and enough funds to build that easy-to-use router of their dreams. "We're trying to give parents...that bridge to the digital divide," he says.
