221–230 of 338 posts
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Why do they always have to look like some unholy blend of a cybernetic spider and a Knight Rider? What happened to a plain unassuming looking piece of industrial hardware...
The WRT54 is still one of my favorite pieces of industrial design. Small case, ~~purple~~blue and grey, two antennas. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linksys_WRT54G_series
I'm not in the US. I can't Amazon. I don't want to spend the equivalent of 1k USD just to get 3 devices in a brainless mesh that covers my ~125sqm place made of insane amounts of radio blocking concrete.
I no longer want to maintain my network, to have network. I want things that just work. The Orbi did that for me - but the costing makes me think abut the future, and not finding a painless solution. I guess that's the tradeoff.
To wit, I also want the mesh comms on another channel (i.e 6Ghz, rather then the 2.4/5.0) and the computers/IOTs/etc isolated from that. Perhaps cheap tri-band is insanely wishful thinking. It sure seems that way.
Got cheaper version without case - designed simple box with cutouts and 3d printed it out.
I can say it works flawlessly. I'm very happy about it. Previously I was using openwrt on different consumer-grade routers and I always had some issues, even when selecting supported devices.
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The planned specs are here, they say it will be made by GL.iNet: https://openwrt.org/voting/2025-02-12-openwrt-two Otherwise this router from GL.iNet has OpenWRT preinstalled, Wifi 7, 5x2.5G: http://www.gl-inet.com/en-gb/products/gl-be9300
In my opinion, get the Flint 2, the Flint 3 doesn't work with vanilla OpenWRT (but it does work with GL.iNet's OpenWrt fork). Then again, I don't need the 5x2.5G ports or Wifi 7 since my internet only goes to 1G.
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I mean: On one hand, 400MB is still a ton of RAM to do useful work with -- and unused RAM is wasted RAM. On the other hand: How many non-routing tasks do you really expect or require a ~$100 home-router-device to perform? :)
Require? Just OpenWRT + blocky. Expect? As much as I can get! I run a full home server, but if I could offload some things to a router, i would.
And even then, I try to keep it vaguely "minimal." I don't offload as much as I can; I try to keep the router-box focused mostly on router-duties. This is because I don't want to have too many dependencies within the router: I'm really not looking to create trouble with the single-point-of-failure device that connects everything I have to the rest of the world.
This is in large part for very practical reasons. If I manage to completely stuff up the router somehow, which isn't particularly unlikely, then I really need to be able to put it back together quickly (so I'm back online quickly) without worrying about a pile of non-routing things.
If I were to put as much stuff as possible into openwrt (as I certainly can; it is just a Linux box after all), then I think I'd quickly find that it'd be better to spin up OpenWRT in a VM on a Real Computer than to keep trying to shoehorn new roles into deliberately-limited hardware.
But maybe that's just me. I got over the idea of running weird stuff on tiny hardware for the lulz nearly 20 years ago, when I was playing with a new WD MyBook World Edition 1TB networked hard drive (which was a Linux box with a shell and a package manager and a whole terabyte of local storage, even though the the sum of the parts was slow AF).
It was fun for a bit to push that limited hardware in interesting ways, and I probably did even run an IRC client on it at some point, but I'm over it. :)
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Wifi 5-7 happened, now operating at 3 different frequency ranges (2.4, 5 and 6Ghz) and using techniques like beam forming and MIMO. All those antennas need to go somewhere. If you want plain unassuming looking hardware get dedicated wifi access points and place them all over the building. There are plenty of those shaped liked big smoke detectors. If you want single device there are also quite a few trash can shaped…
Why does Wifi 5-7 require designing the case so it is shaped like an F-117 fighter jet instead of a box of candy?
Almost none of the Ubiquity stuff looks like that. Xiaomi has plenty of white/gray cylinders or boxes with rounded corners. TP-link has whole Deco series, Asus has ZenWifi series. Majority of MikroTik non rack mounted hardware also targets more neutral design.
You also have to consider who is the target audience for dedicated all in one wifi routers. Majority of regular people are fine with the WiFi that's builtin the modem provided by their ISP. Any serious commercial office will have the IT team to setup separate (rack mounted) router/switches and ceiling mounted access points that look like previously mentioned smoke alarms. People with large enough house to need multiple access points but aren't IT specialists willing to wire up Ethernet everywhere -> various product lines described as mesh routers. Like the trash can shaped TP link Deco series and similar from other manufacturers. If your house is not that big, nothing stops you to buy one of them and ignore the mesh functionality. That leaves people living in small enough house/apartment to be served by single router/switch/Wifi access point combo but for some reason not being satisfied what the ISP provides and also wanting multiple wired connections. Exclude the IT specialists willing to set up home lab and you are left with gamers (potentially impressed by black spider) and few others who have hopefully have enough rationality to place the router where it's not an eyesore or picking some of the previously mentioned stuff.
Another factor is move from antennas that are simple correctly size wire maybe with some spiral which easily fits in small rounded antenna to flat pcb antennas which encourage more rectangular design of the antenna housing and rest of the router. A lot of it is still partially just for the show, trying to give the impression "this one has more/bigger antennas must be better WiFi", but oversized partially empty plastic antenna housing were a thing even before current spider trend.
White slightly rounded 8 legged spider still looks like spider. Trash cans have a bunch of antennas but they hide them in larger volume. Dedicated access points have the advantage of being placed more predictably (near ceiling with little obstacles), they also have advantage of being distributed less work for each of them instead of single router covering whole house.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The planned specs are here, they say it will be made by GL.iNet: https://openwrt.org/voting/2025-02-12-openwrt-two Otherwise this router from GL.iNet has OpenWRT preinstalled, Wifi 7, 5x2.5G: http://www.gl-inet.com/en-gb/products/gl-be9300
Why do they always have to look like some unholy blend of a cybernetic spider and a Knight Rider? What happened to a plain unassuming looking piece of industrial hardware...
I love the phrasing, we usually call this design language as transformers mating.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wifi 5-7 happened, now operating at 3 different frequency ranges (2.4, 5 and 6Ghz) and using techniques like beam forming and MIMO. All those antennas need to go somewhere. If you want plain unassuming looking hardware get dedicated wifi access points and place them all over the building. There are plenty of those shaped liked big smoke detectors. If you want single device there are also quite a few trash can shaped…
Why does Wifi 5-7 require designing the case so it is shaped like an F-117 fighter jet instead of a box of candy?