I decided to avoid work a little by porting FreeBSD/MIPS to the AR9132 in the TP-LINK WN-1043nd 802.11n wireless AP I have here. There's existing OpenWRT code for it so I figured the port wouldn't be that difficult.
It turns out I was right. The AR91xx support took a couple of days to massage into a form which was good enough to commit to FreeBSD-HEAD. I also included some basic AR713x SoC support - not enough to be completely useful, but enough to get a head-start on porting.
* The EEPROM is not in the same location(s) as the AR5416 - it needs to be copied and then shoe-horned into the AR5416 eeprom access code.
Also, there's an RTL8133RB gigabit switch device on-board. There's also code in Linux/OpenWRT to support this. I'll look at porting this once the AR9100 support is done.
Satellite instead of NBN? Hello latency..
"Mr Ballantine today argued that for most of Australia’s geography broadband delivered over satellite would be faster and cheaper. What was right for the city he argued was not necessarily good for the outback."
Maybe for download throughput, sure. But latency plays a huge part in satellite (and 3G style solutions) and it will be noticable.
Satellite IP doesn't scale. Sorry guys.