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Ask HN: Why have WiFi routers become so expensive?

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Re: Ask HN: Why have WiFi routers become so expensive?

#11

Post by sandreas »

Routers are unreasonable priced. There are routers that cost >200$, because they have a "gaming" in the name and routers that are The wifi chipset, CPU and Memory are the parts that count, maybe also the ethernet ports and usb. So if you wanna buy a good but cheap router, I would buy a used one that has reasonable price and good specs.

I'd also prefer support for Wifi 6(e), but if you are on a budget, old standards high end hardware is really cheap on the used marked.

So here is what I recommend: Look at the OpenWRT list of hardware filtered by ax[1], sort by CPU MHz and look through the table for a good Mediatek / MT chipset in the column WLAN Hardware (the CPU sorting is "alphabetical", not natural, so it might be that the most powerful ones are in the middle of the table).

I recommend:

  - Ubiquity Unify (AP - if you need a router, don't buy)
  - AVM Fritz!Box 7520 / 7530 (not in the list, but a german bargain)
  - Linksys E8450 (aka. Belkin RT3200)
  - GL.iNet GL-MT6000
  - Asus TUF-AX4200 / TUF-AX6000
  - BananaPi BPi R3
  - Xiaomi AX6000 / AX9000
  - Netgear WAX220 (AP)

Re: Ask HN: Why have WiFi routers become so expensive?

#12

Post by nspattak »

sandreas wrote: post #11

Routers are unreasonable priced. There are routers that cost >200$, because they have a "gaming" in the name and routers that are The wifi chipset, CPU and Memory are the parts that count, maybe also the ethernet ports and usb. So if you wanna buy a good but cheap router, I would buy a used one that has reasonable price and good specs. I'd also prefer support for Wifi 6(e), but if you are on a budget, old standards h…

You are right, these are what matter and thanks for the suggestions.

I am not particularly on a budget but I don't either require wifi7, I am not willing to pay 3* more than I should. I am lazy and searching for something that is supported by merlin and I will look into the used market as well.

Re: Ask HN: Why have WiFi routers become so expensive?

#13

Post by sandreas »

sandreas wrote: post #11

Routers are unreasonable priced. There are routers that cost >200$, because they have a "gaming" in the name and routers that are The wifi chipset, CPU and Memory are the parts that count, maybe also the ethernet ports and usb. So if you wanna buy a good but cheap router, I would buy a used one that has reasonable price and good specs. I'd also prefer support for Wifi 6(e), but if you are on a budget, old standards h…

haha i forgot to link the list: https://openwrt.org/toh/views/toh_available_16128_ax-wifi?da...

Re: Ask HN: Why have WiFi routers become so expensive?

#14

Post by sandreas »

nspattak wrote: post #12
sandreas wrote: post #11

Routers are unreasonable priced. There are routers that cost >200$, because they have a "gaming" in the name and routers that are The wifi chipset, CPU and Memory are the parts that count, maybe also the ethernet ports and usb. So if you wanna buy a good but cheap router, I would buy a used one that has reasonable price and good specs. I'd also prefer support for Wifi 6(e), but if you are on a budget, old standards h…

You are right, these are what matter and thanks for the suggestions. I am not particularly on a budget but I don't either require wifi7, I am not willing to pay 3* more than I should. I am lazy and searching for something that is supported by merlin and I will look into the used market as well.

I'm not convinced that I would choose Merlin, because it only supports a very limited amount of devices. However, I had Asus routers in the past and they were not half bad.

If you don't need USB and could switch to OpenWRT, you could go for a Netgear WAX 202 - I got a used one for 50 bucks, pretty stable so far. Or maybe a TP-Link AX 1800 for 60 bucks new.

Re: Ask HN: Why have WiFi routers become so expensive?

#16

Post by nspattak »

sandreas wrote: post #14
nspattak wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are right, these are what matter and thanks for the suggestions. I am not particularly on a budget but I don't either require wifi7, I am not willing to pay 3* more than I should. I am lazy and searching for something that is supported by merlin and I will look into the used market as well.

I'm not convinced that I would choose Merlin, because it only supports a very limited amount of devices. However, I had Asus routers in the past and they were not half bad. If you don't need USB and could switch to OpenWRT, you could go for a Netgear WAX 202 - I got a used one for 50 bucks, pretty stable so far. Or maybe a TP-Link AX 1800 for 60 bucks new.

Again, I very much agree with you, very sound advice. The reason I stick with merlin/Asus is that I do not want to spend too much time, I want to buy sth, configure/deploy/forget.

Re: Ask HN: Why have WiFi routers become so expensive?

#17

Post by psd1 »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #15

Glinet routers are good and reasonably priced.

I would caution that the cheaper models in the lineup don't have the grunt to deliver the features to a usable degree.

I can run tailscale on the Opal, but it's constrained to ~2Mb/s. The Mango, I can't even download package lists.

Re: Ask HN: Why have WiFi routers become so expensive?

#18

Post by psd1 »

1oooqooq wrote: post #7
nspattak wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question is why are they able to inflate the prices like this and get away with ?

Exactly the same as GPUs. There's two companies. if you want top shelf routers, it will have qualcomm chips (cpu/soc/radio). If it is a budget one, it will have mediatek. Also, we had a flood of demand and new versions coming out. which literary added nothing. Some will wrongly say "mimo", "beamforming", etc... but those were all present since "wifi5" (ac) and have just been "standardized" in wifi6 (ax), wifi6e (ax+6…

Of course, bumping transmit power on the AP does little to help poor little mobiles that can't transmit back.

Sure, you get 5 bars of signal strength indicated, but your TCP performance is still garbage.

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