Skydog Routers To Brick At End Of Service

[Julio Urquidi]

As it ends service, Skydog is rewarding its customers with dead hardware.

Customers are getting notices that not only will their Skydog app stop working, but the associated router will no longer be functional. Skydog has started to send 60 day expiration notices to subscribers saying:

Unfortunately, the Skydog product has been discontinued and the subscription cannot be renewed. Upon expiration of your subscription, you will no longer be able to access your account and the router will no longer function.​

Similar to what Revolv customers experienced after the smart-home company was acquired by Google/Nest, Skydog customers will soon end up with useless hardware that formerly was a functional cloud-based device.

Skydog’s parent company, PowerCloud Systems, was acquired by Comcast in July, 2014.

 

[sfx2000]

Most of these were OEM'ed by Senao (Engenius/Zyxel), and the firmware based on OpenWRT, so wondering if they still have some OpenWRT support?

 

[L&LD]

Wasn't this (or something very similar) posted already?

 

[RMerlin]

Most of these were OEM'ed by Senao (Engenius/Zyxel), and the firmware based on OpenWRT, so wondering if they still have some OpenWRT support?

They might be locked down. The very least the manufacturer should do is to fully unlock these devices, allowing users to flash their flavour of Linux/DD-WRT on it.

 

[mikeeliaspgh]

As it ends service, Skydog is rewarding its customers with dead hardware.

View attachment 6116​

Customers are getting notices that not only will their Skydog app stop working, but the associated router will no longer be functional. Skydog has started to send 60 day expiration notices to subscribers saying:

Unfortunately, the Skydog product has been discontinued and the subscription cannot be renewed. Upon expiration of your subscription, you will no longer be able to access your account and the router will no longer function.​

Similar to what Revolv customers experienced after the smart-home company was acquired by Google/Nest, Skydog customers will soon end up with useless hardware that formerly was a functional cloud-based device.

Skydog’s parent company, PowerCloud Systems, was acquired by Comcast in July, 2014.

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Wondering if there is any new info on this? Any way to keep the router alive? (or it is being bricked for sure?)
My subscription ends in about 30 days

Please advise.

 

[System Error Message]

I dont know what the news is but if the device has debug port (like JTAG) and serial you might be able to install your own firmware. It is very dependent on the platform and whether or not those physical ports are available. Some platforms will have their own bootloader or some underlaying code that runs in debug mode that'd let you manually flash a firmware while some dont. Many manufacturers dont include these ports in their product.

 

[thiggins]

Wondering if there is any new info on this? Any way to keep the router alive? (or it is being bricked for sure?)
My subscription ends in about 30 days

Why bother? What is so compelling about keeping it running?