Comment by ssl-3

Maybe, maybe not.

Some companies aren't very big, and neither are their budgets. And of course, it might be said that there is no solution more permanent than a temporary one.

We've got a large-ish color laser printer (IIRC, an HP 4600) at one of our locations. It's not a big place; it has only had as many as 3 people working there regularly and has been normally staffed by exactly 1 person for the last several years.

When we moved into that building, a missing link was noticed: The printer did not feature wifi, and there was no way to get a clean ethernet drop to it without visible external conduit. The boss man didn't like the idea of conduit.

To get it working for now, I went over to Wal-Mart and bought whatever the current rev of Linksys WRT54G was. I put some iteration of Tomato on it so it could operate in station mode and graft the printer into the wifi network.

I plugged that blue Linksys box in back in 2007; it turned 18 years old this year.

It's pretty little slow by modern wifi standards, and the 2.4GHz band is much more congested than it used to be, but: It still works, and nobody seems motivated to spend money to implement a better solution... so it remains.