Netduma Luke

Ten years ago today, we launched Netduma. When you’re in a startup, you spend most of your time looking forward. Rarely, if ever, do you look back. Learn from your mistakes, don’t dwell on them, keep improving. But today, we want to pause for a moment. It has been a decade, after all. The Beginning We launched Netduma from Iain’s parents' kitchen. Our website had just gone live, selling the Netduma R1—our first router. It was no wallflower. Frankly, it looked a bit like a fire alarm, only had 2.4GHz WiFi, but the software Iain had built was unlike anything else out there. We sold out of those first R1s almost instantly. The e-commerce site Iain’s dad had hurriedly put together held up well. Our logistics process? Not so much. That led to many all-nighters as we worked through the order backlog. When you’re a startup, it’s impossible to be good at everything. But to make it, you need to be exceptional at one or two things. We had two. As gamers, we knew firsthand how much lag sucks. And with Iain’s brain, we could actually do something about it. Soon after, we moved into our first office (to the relief of Iain’s parents, whose house had begun to resemble a factory floor). We hired our first full-time employees. Word spread about what our software could do. Bit by bit, month by month, we levelled up. We improved our software. We grew our team. We made mistakes. We learned from them. We kept going. And we repeated that over and over. The very first Netduma office. Looking Ahead Fast forward to today. Our tech stack has evolved from fixing lag in games to fixing all bad Internet - for work calls, video streaming, and everything else. We’re partnered with British Telecom, Telstra, NETGEAR, Nokia, Genexis, and Mercku, with more partnerships to announce next year. Just a few weeks ago, our Service Provider business won the Scale-Up of Network X award. We’ve got a great team, great customers, and great support around us. And we’ve managed to do all this without any investment, putting every penny we made back into R&D to make new features (more on that further down). If you’re reading this, you’ve likely been part of the journey. Whether it was buying one (or all!) of our routers, helping on the forum, or telling us how we could improve - you’ve made a difference. Every piece of feedback, the good and the bad, has helped shape who we are today. None of this would have been possible without the support we’ve had along the way. Thank you. But here’s the exciting part: we’re just getting started. For the past few years, we’ve been working on two groundbreaking features. When we first envisioned them, we weren’t sure they’d even be possible. One fixes bufferbloat once and for all, with no downsides. The other pinpoints the root causes of poor Internet performance, whenever they occur. These features are set to shake up the industry and will be announced early next year. While it’s great to look back on the past ten years, we’re even more excited about what’s ahead. A huge thank you to our elite team in Cambridge, our incredible partners, and everyone who has supported us along the way. Thank you, Luke, Iain, and the entire Netduma Team P.S. If you haven’t yet bought our award-winning Netduma R3 router, which runs the very latest Netduma software, you can use the code ‘10Years’ for 10% off—this week only.

Hi everyone, This is an update for you guys on where we are with DumaOS and specifically, the XR/NPG routers which is why we have posted it in this subforum. First of all, here’s the current status for each XR router, including links to where you can get the latest firmware for those of you who don’t already have it installed: XR300 – V1.0.3.68 (DumaOS 2.0) XR450/XR500 – V2.3.2.130 (DumaOS 3.0) XR700 – V1.0.1.46 (DumaOS 3.0 Beta) XR1000 – V1.0.0.58 (DumaOS 3.0) Now to address the problem: the speed at which XR users have been getting new firmwares. We realise it has been far too slow. Here’s how the firmware building process typically works: Every few months a new DumaOS firmware is completed This first must pass our internal testing Then it moves over to NETGEAR where it must pass their testing, including all the non-DumaOS side of the firmware Then it goes into closed beta testing Eventually, if all has gone well, it will be released The big problem we have is that if there is an issue at any point, the entire process needs to start again. Considering all the different XR routers DumaOS is on combined with the fact all of them have very large user bases (meaning disaster if a serious bug gets through) and you begin to see the problem. So, what can we do about this? We asked ourselves the same question at the beginning of the year and we have been working on a solution ever since. We’ll be putting a blog and video together to explain in more detail what we have done, but here is a summary. We have created a brand new ‘build system’ which will drastically speed up how quickly we can build and test firmware. One part of this system involved writing hundreds and hundreds of automatic tests which allow a bunch of computers to test DumaOS without any human involvement. Another part is to allow us to trigger new internal firmware builds every night. The purpose of this is to gather all the latest changes our developers have made during the day, build a new firmware and then kick off the automated tests. This means we can catch bugs before human testers ever get their hands on the firmware. The end result of all of this is we can make stable and well tested DumaOS much, much faster than ever before. We’ve been working on this build system for some time and last week, we released a new R2 firmware. It was our very first full firmware built using the new build system, so it’s a bit of a landmark moment for us. Our plan is to now use this new system for all future DumaOS 3.0 firmwares, including XR routers, Telstra Game Optimiser, the R1 etc. It’ll take us a bit of time to tweak it to work with each router, but once done it will become very easy for us to prepare rock-solid firmwares to send to NETGEAR for their testing before then releasing them to you guys. There’s still one sticking point left: the XR300 community. We really do know how far behind you are, and it sucks. All I can say is we’ll do everything in our power to try and bring you up to the latest version using this new build system - I can’t promise it will work, but we’ll do our very best. The last thing to say is we realise we’ve been pretty quiet over the past few months in terms of communication. Behind the scenes, we’ve never been busier. We’ve got some massive features coming out in 2022. Honestly, it’s going to be the biggest leap forward we’ve ever made in our technology and is the culmination of several years of R&D. We’ve also doubled the size of our team over the past 18 months. We know it’s been a long wait, but the payoff will be worth it. Thank you for all the patience on this. We know we’ve got a brilliant user community, we feel very blessed and fortunate to have you. We think you’ll love what’s coming out next and we’ll begin to share more details with you on what we have been up to, so stay tuned. The Netduma Team

Hi Everyone, Today we are delighted to announce that signups for the DumaOS 3.0 beta are now open - this will be gradually rolled out to everyone who signs up, over time. This is a big step. It means that after many months of hard work, we are now ready for you guys to begin testing 3.0 on your DumaOS powered routers. What is in DumaOS 3.0? It’s named 3.0 for a reason. It marks the next generation of DumaOS, our router operating system. Not only will 3.0 come with a whole bunch of new features for your router, we have also overhauled a tonne of things under the hood which will make it far easier for us to get new features to you in the future. So far, we have announced four of the eight major features coming in 3.0. You can read more about each of them here: Geo-Fencing: draw multiple Geo-Filters of any shape around your favourite server banks Application QoS: prioritize the traffic that matters the most to you by allocating bandwidth by application type e.g. gaming, streaming etc. Connection Benchmark: run a pure test of your Internet line to find out how stable your ping is and if you are getting your full bandwidth speeds Traffic Controller: block any applications, ports or devices from accessing the Internet. Feature 5: Announcing Soon Feature 6: Announcing Soon Feature 7: Announcing Soon Feature 8: Announcing Soon Further feature reveals will be posted on our blog here: https://netduma.com/blog/ How do I Signup? Netduma R1 owners - go here: https://netduma.com/dumaos-3-0-signup-for-netduma-r1/ Nighthawk Pro Gaming users (XR300, XR450, XR500, XR700) - go here: http://www.netgearinnovation.com/dumaos-beta/index.html When will I get the beta? When making a major software update like 3.0, it's normal for things to not be perfect at the start. So as much as we would love each and every one of you to get your hands on 3.0 right now, it would be risky for us to do it in one go. Instead we will be phasing the roll-out, starting off with a small number of testers. Once things are looking good, we will add some more, then more, gradually increasing until everyone who has signed up has received the upgrade. When we are ready for you to join the beta you will get an email into your inbox with instructions on how to join. Please be patient - we will email you when we are ready. Finally... We want to thank you for your support and patience during the development of 3.0. We are very aware that it has taken time. But it really has been worth it. It has allowed us to take DumaOS to the next level. Work is already underway on 3.1 and we're working on some seriously big features that will give you even more control over your lag and your network. We hope you have fun testing 3.0. The ND Team

Apologies - replying to your message now! One of the devs will get back to you on your questions when they're next in this thread.

Don't worry, it was put on our Roadmap at the time!

Nothing stopping us doing this - so it's good to know you'd be interested in a new router from us.

Glad you like it sir! Happy Christmas! P.S. You have an excellent beard.

Massive thank you to my Secret Santa. 2011 Merlot all the way from the US of A. Very happy. Sorry about the dodgy photo.

I've received mine! We (Iain, Fraser and me) are about to open each of ours now.

Gamertag: Netduma Luke Console: XB1 Your Home location: UK

Massive thank you Chive. You've made our French-speaking users experiences so much better and you've given your time freely to do it. Thank you so much.

Congrats mate and thanks for all your help so far.

Question for everyone - should the console be split out into four consoles, or should it just be one category? Say someone wanted to create a GTA V thread, I think it would be diluted if they had to pick between one of the four, would be better to just have one category, Amirite?

It really is. This forum restores my faith in humanity. Congrats you four.

Jeez. Iain and I preferred #5 so this means that today, I have learnt that I must have terrible taste! Not as bad as this though...