Trey Johnson, an IT staff member at the University of Florida in Gainesville, said that choosing a noncommercial technology with a limited enterprise-level track record could pose problems for IT managers. "That makes a hard sell for going into a business model with it," Johnson said.

The university uses an open-source router supported by Vyatta. "[The router] actually has a company backing it -- you can buy support for it, which makes it more viable," Johnson said.

Others say that community support, an open-source hallmark, can cut two ways in an enterprise setting. Communities don't usually respond as quickly as IT managers would like, and they don't offer inexperienced users one-on-one instruction.

Noble and Johnson are two among a small but growing number of IT managers eschewing proprietary routers in favor of open-source alternatives for a variety of reasons.

Noble, for example, says pain-free customization is the technology's biggest benefit. "The flexibility of having a free software stack built into our routers will let us make a small change -- a tweak -- or an addition, and be able to continue with minimal impact on long-range plans."

Barry Hassler, president of Hassler Communication Systems Technology Inc., an ISP and network designer in Beavercreek, Ohio, said he uses IProute, a Linux-based open-source routing technology distributed by the Linux Foundation, to provide his company's large users with enterprise-level Internet access at an affordable price. "I'm using standard PC hardware, running Linux, with the routing functionality built in," he says. "What we're doing with these boxes is routing among multiple interfaces, which is fairly standard routing, but beyond that, we're also able to do bandwidth management."

Hassler estimated that a comparable Cisco router would cost more than twice as much as the Linux-based IProute router he chose. "That helps keep [overall] costs low," he says.

IT consulting firm CMIT Solutions of Central Rhode Island has installed open-source DD-WRT firmware in both of its Linksys wireless routers to gain additional capabilities, said Adam Tucker, a network engineer at the firm. "We wanted a robust wireless system that would allow us to manage quality of service for prioritizing voice over IP [and] things like that, as well as to add some of the more advanced filtering and stuff the [old] firmware simply didn't support," he says.

Tucker said the routers have worked flawlessly for well over a year.

Fabbi said he sees significant potential for open-source routers, particularly in the retail and food services industries, where large companies must often link thousands of sites without breaking the budget. "You think of a McDonald's or a Burger King [where] there are tens of thousands of franchisee-type locations but you still want them connected," he said.