Ask HN: Why have WiFi routers become so expensive?

In February 2022 I bought an Asus RT-AC86U for 85€. Its price has nothing but increased. Today it costs 245€ almost 3X more!!! A 5 year old model that doesn't even support the latest wifi standards. All the Asus modems I occasionally check (as I would like to test mesh) follow a similar pattern. Anyone has an explanation why even Nvidia lowers it's prices but not wifi routeurs?

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

Because its not illegal?

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+6ghz), wifi7 (be)... the real improvement after wifi5 was simply higher frequencies (pointless since your internet pipe is still crap) and more power (by relaxing power limits). really nothing else because even the features that were standardized might not be present or be badly implemented anyway, like half wifi6e routers not even having a 6ghz radio.

Because some people are locked into certain exact models of hardware for all sorts of reasons. That's why there's still a market for PDP11 hardware decades after it became obsolete.

Simply storing something for decades has costs, which factor into the price.

As for the general upward trends in capacity and price, of WiFi gear, we're now at the point where they are using multipath and phased array antennas to get around the Shannon limit on Data transmission, effectively using the same channel more than once. It's fscking magic!