I spent a couple of weeks in Armenia 6-7 years ago, at which point the ENTIRE country had a total bandwidth of something like 6mbit. There was only one state-run ISP (no competition was allowed at that time, that has changed it seems), and the company I worked for had somehow managed to get a 640kbit line from them, so we had roughly 10% of the entire country's bandwidth (for 2-300 people). At one point I stupidly did a apt-get upgrade which started downloading Evolution and lots of Gnome stuff, which in turn chocked the entire office's internet access. When I stopped the download it was running at roughly 600kbit, so at that point I was using 10% of the entire nation's bandwidth :)

The state communication monopoly also meant that I couldn't use my phone, since my provider did not have a roaming agreement. If you got really close to the Turkish border it did work though, if you could connect to a Turkish provider.

This said Armenia was incredibly beautiful, with very friendly people and great food, and I would really encourage anyone to go there!

What I find even more impressive is how NASA, ESA and others manages space probes I think, that's really extreme conditions in every way. Often huge communication delays and poor bandwidth, absolutely no chance of at least eventually fixing a problem on-site, hardware constantly being subjected to intense radiation and extreme temperature differences. Imagine that rather unpleasant feeling you get when you reboot a remote server and you know you won't be able to go on-site any time soon to fix it if you did something wrong, then take that feeling and add the fact that you can _never_ fix it, that it costs millions or even billions to send it there, that lots of valuable science might be lost or never take place, and that you'll be guaranteed to read about your mistake in the news the following day. I guess it calls for rather extreme levels of testing before doing any changes at all.

"near-asynchronous replication" is wrong, should be "semi-synchronous replication" as stated in the article. Striving for almost having replication asynchronous sounds like a poor implementation of synchronous replication :)

I'm running Tomato, and reviews seems to indicate that it should be slightly faster than DD-WRT in some cases, but the difference would not be major in any sense. There's a year and a half old review of the two firmwares with some figures here.

None of them get close to 100 Mpbs unfortunately. Overclocking would help, but I doubt it would be enough. There's some info on overclocking DD-WRT here.

As for the RouterStation Pro there's some info on the recently completed competition to develop a Open-WRT based admin interface for it, posted in slashdot a few weeks ago, some furher details here.

I really like the WRT-routers, they're stable and cheap, but a bit too slow.

I have a WRT54GL and a 100/10 conection as well, and I can also confirm that getting above 30-40 Mbps is difficult. With some tweaking seems to be possible to reach 50 perhaps, but then the CPU simply won't handle more traffic. Enabling QoS or other features will obviously decrease this value even more. At first I thought I might have misconfigured something, but after a lot of googling this really seems to be the capacity limit of these routers.

Looking for an alternative that's quiet, low power and linux friendly I came across the Routerstation Pro http://www.ubnt.com/products/rspro.php. It runs the same linux-based firmwares as the WRT line of routers, but with a CPU clocked more than 3 times as high, more RAM and expansion possibilities etc. I have not tested it yet though, but reviews seems promising, routing 100 Mpbs should not be a problem.

Reducing what Greenpeace does to just being fearful of technological progress seems very cynical. I'd say that in this case and most other cases as well being cautious about introducing something untested like Monsantos product to both nature and our own food supply has nothing to do with fear of technology, it's just common sense. I don't know about you, but I would be very reluctant to eat something which is surrounded by so much secrecy as MON863 seems to be, and Monsantos very poor track record on similar issues isn't exactly making me more reassured. Sad part is that most of us have probably already eaten this maize in some form without knowing it.