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Comment by vsviridov | Hacker News Reader

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...

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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 home routers.

That complaint was about its styling, not number of antennas

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?

A shit ton of beam forming and phased arrays. Why do you think all of a sudden there's a bunch of "WiFi Radar Imaging" projects popping up on HN? It's not just because of advances in ML. Boost the output power by a few more magnitudes and you can probably ship them to Ukraine.

Because the gamers and dads who make all the purchasing decisions about household routers love F-117s, and stealth bombers, and consider fighter jets and black “Nighthawk” branding to be way sexier than a pink box of candy.

Don't buy one which looks like that if visuals are important for you. I already told that there are plenty of models which avoids this design and form factor. Do I have to spell out specific manufacturers and models?

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.

I guess the aerodynamic design makes the Wifi faster... ;-)

You don't have to buy such a design, the ubiquiti u7 lite and u7 pro are ordinary round white ceiling mount 802.11be AP.

Somehow ordinary non tech consumers got it into their heads that something which looks like a f117 with many spiky antennas sticking out of it must be faster.

I could be crazy, but don't all the external antennas allow for more flexibility with regard to directionality of signal?

I have a U7 Lite and it is very directional compared to other routers I have used (spider style, trash can style, etc.)

Yes, perhaps they do allow for greater flexibility, but that's complex and difficult to do well/reliably, and doing it well/reliably requires signal analysis gear and software modeling that's out of the reach of normal consumers.

The U7 Lite only does 2x2 MIMO. Compared to 4x4 MIMO in the U6 LR, the U7 Lite therefore does a much poorer job at beamforming (directing the energy of the signal towards the device).

Personally, I find it better to have multiple low end access points (like the TP-Link Archer C80 which has 3x3 MIMO on 5 GHz) deployed to achieve excellent coverage in a house. Sadly, the U7 line is a bit too expensive for that. Plus, I'm loathe to deal with UniFi deployments now that I am well versed in the glass jaws in the platform.

There really is space in the market for a product line that is basically what UniFi is, but done "right". Ie: can be debugged or you can fix it without an internet connection or recover the system when the owner forgets the password and lost access to the email account used for 2FA. UniFi is an absolute nightmare the moment anything goes even slightly wrong.

I went from Unifi to Ruckus APs and never looked back.

You can find older generations on eBay very inexpensively for what they are, install Ruckus Unleashed firmware on them, and operate them completely locally.

They have the best beamforming antennas in the industry and their firmware is rock solid. I'm on some very old models (2.4ghz and 5ghz only) but they work fantastically well. I'll probably upgrade to some wifi 6 models soon.

But for my uses 500-600mbps rock solid throughout my house is plenty. Anything where I want max throughput/low latency/low jitter (mainly gaming) is hardwired. For wifi I care much more about complete and consistent coverage.

Presumably you can do a snare drum shape with antennas arranged like tension rods, for whatever reason they do articulating antennas.

As for why it needs multiple antennas, it's for MIMO and beam forming.

I am not sure why a simple cylinder shape should be called "trash can shape". It can be favorably compared to many things. How about an R2D2-shaped router?

The "trash can Mac" made this phrase permanent

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

Still have one, still works. Would happily use it if it were still practical. I think you can still load OpenWRT on them, but there's no software route around the hardware being outdated and slow.

Yeah me to. I hade a WRT54G V2.2 for ages. Loved that thing. Just toslow now tho.

As a counter opinion to "too slow" in regards to 54Mbps, as it likely depends on your use cases. My WRT54GL was the primary family router until 2018 and even worked just fine for live video broadcasting. Even today it sees good use for video calls with no issues at all. Lovely little piece of hardware that refuses to die. Just a shame that OpenWRT has dropped support since 2013, which feels a bit ironic given their name.

> I think you can still load OpenWRT on them

Not a recent version, not from the last 10 years at least. They dropped even 8/32MB devices. On my Turris Omnia, the bare system with nothing else running takes about 70MB RAM, mostly because of kernel size. Linux itself isn't as light as it used to be.

The best you can do is put DD-WRT on it. AFAIK, they still use kernel v2.6 on devices this old.

My first WiFi router :)

I bought it in anticipation of the Nintendo DS having WiFi capabilities, which I had never heard of before (I was like 13 or 14 then). Had to convince my parents to get broadband internet too.

One could stack them.

I was so annoyed that the Linksys cable modem, that came in the exact same color scheme was not stackable with the routers. You had a wifi router and a non wifi router in the same exact case with same exact front panel. But no, the modem was completely different form factor.

I have been extremely happy with cisco 3802 access points purchased on ebay for $25 each. Sure, it's only wifi5, but they're pretty solid and you can just deploy a swarm of them.

And they don't look fugly.

It is a tremendous shame that cisco hasn't opensourced / unlocked this generation of kit.

Documentation for how to set these up without the cisco control platform being present is hard to come by.

You have any docs on how to set these up? I believe a firmware change is required.

Unfortunately you need to use the cisco software / firmware. The access points run linux but they're locked down like crazy with signed firmware blobs and such.

That said, the cisco firmware for this specific generation of access points is actually free and trivial to get -- create yourself a cisco account and go to downloads and download the 3802 "mobility express" firmware. The last ME firmware came out in 2024 and all this equipment and software is now totally unsupported by cisco so don't run PCI transactions at home... I'd also avoid running their captive portal or some of their other weird features...

Actually setting it up is a bit of a chore but it is a full featured "enterprise" (cough) AP management system with all the knobs and twiddles you could ask for.

It's really only a good idea if you don't value your time (like me) or if you have a sprawling plaster house where you want to have lots of cheap access points instead of a couple super fast ones.

Lastly, for better or worse, I haven't been able to make my kid's switch 2 work on the network.

LLMs are great at checking logs and tweaking these clis in a logged in ssh tmux pane

About the Nintendo Switch 2: Maybe try perusing https://www.reddit.com/r/NintendoSwitch/comments/1l3vqkv/sol...

Uni has an adapter for USB to Ethernet (if wired is an option) that works with those Nintendo devices, I have one that an extended family member borrowed (unknown if the Switch was a 1 or 2).

I don't know why I've never tried just doing it the Cisco way. Thank you for the walk-through.

Cisco has trained a generation of home-lab would-be cisco engineers to dig through shady russian forums to download sketchball binaries. I think they even hide the checksums of their gated binaries, just to make sure you're never sure how sketchy their code might be.

But in the one specific case of mobility express, you can ... just download it. Unexpected but actually pretty cool.

You still have to figure out installing and configuring it, which is mildly tedious, and you'll probably need one of those cisco serial cables, but it is an exciting side-quest instead of a dirty forum crawl.

To bring it back to "openwrt" -- this nonsense by cisco, broadcom, HP, IBM, etc is why generation after generation the "enterprise" market is dying -- they're excluding 90% of the would-be engineers from the job market protecting their e-waste from secondary or later reuse, likely just on the off-chance they might make a tiny amount of money downstream. But I guess that's not a line-item that shows up in the quarterly reports (what's the value of "community goodwill" ?)

TBH if I wanted a bunch of closed source 802.11ac (2017 era) AP purchased on eBay, I would go for Unifi stuff far before Cisco. There's a plethora of it available from decommissioned sites.

I didn't look at those; do they support running some controller thing in one of the APs to allow central management of all the nodes?

Cisco's mobility express just runs on one of the APs and can fail over to another of the APs; it's a slick piece of software.

And yes, it isn't open source, which is a real shame since cisco's killed it (as far as I can tell) and it probably represents an enormous and sophisticated investment in effort and engineering and it'll just melt into entropy.

I loath cisco and don't recommend their kit lightly. In this one case, they seem to have accidentally made (for my use case, running 5 APs at home) a perfect product. They're cheap, extremely reliable, my wife doesn't hate them (though mostly they're in the attic or basement; only one is visible), they've got a (relatively) easy to use UI that manages all of them at once, and (Except for the switch 2) they seem to just work even though I've got vlans and lots of SSIDs and other goofy stuff).

If I had a simpler house to support, I'd just get a single WRT capable "big fast" router / AP...

Ruckus Unleashed works the same way and plenty of them on ebay. TIL, thank you

Thanks for the head's up! The Rukus Unleashed looks like the perfect replacement for my icky system.

I'll put in an ebay search notification for when the R650 (and R750) for $50 each and maybe it'll ding in a couple years and I'll be in a place to swap out the 3802 network I've got running now...

I don't know if the one you're talking about is one of these, but in the many years I worked at Cisco they seemed to buy a company every few weeks. Many of them had decent products which Cisco then meticulously destroyed. Luckily there was always kit to preserve for future generations, which I dutifully stacked in my attic.

I'm overall not a fan of Cisco; quite the opposite. There are lots of companies ahead of Cisco in the "pretty not so cool" these days so my ire is not as strong as it was when I was a young idealist.

As far as I can tell, in this one case (with mobility express) it seems like Cisco accidentally did something overall (IMO) "good" for the world by making it possible for their kit to be reused by some part of the world where someone will get utility out of the still very nice equipment and somehow cisco won't see a dime from that "someone is using cisco equipment" event.

Mobility express isn't perfect, but considering the cost of the gear and the cost of the license, it is pretty darned good. I suspect some product manager at cisco got fired for accidentally making the world not quite as bad a place as it could be if cisco extracted license fees on all the 2802, 3802, and 4800 access points or otherwise sent them to the e-waste bin 4 years early.

Because a modern wifi router requires a minimum of 6 antennas. 9 is even better.

This lends itself to a spider like design with just a ton of antennas sticking out of a box, or a trash can with the antennas hidden inside around the outside edge.

Do you have other ideas for how to lay it out?

My radio knowledge is not up to par, but couldn't a phased array antenna setup allow for friendlier form factors?

But usually it is a phased-array setup, or it seems to be, with a row of antennas.

Another setup is circular or semicircular. I suppose it allows for a more uniform directional diagram across the entire 360°, because a straight phased array has harder time emitting sideways.

Some 3-band wifi 7 AIO routers that resemble neither spiders, nor trash cans:

https://mikrotik.com/product/hap_be3_media

https://eero.com/shop/eero-pro-7

https://www.asus.com/us/networking-iot-servers/whole-home-me...

The Mikrotik HAP have terrible coverage, and the other two are the hallmark trashcan design I mentioned.

The spider look comes from multiple antennas. Multiple antennas are needed for beamforming [1]; they represent a minimal phased array.

[1]: https://www.networkworld.com/article/967954/beamforming-expl...

It is probably a combination of hitting a (low) cost and mimo; cisco makes pretty reasonable looking APs with lots of radios and decent coverage and they look like UFOs not alien spiders.

But it's probably easier / cheaper to get maximum coverage at larger distances from a single AP using a big array of sticking out antennae, and that's what a normal home user is going to want.

> and they look like UFOs not alien spiders.

I feel like there's an untapped market here. I want them to go with the alien spaceship concept all the way thru; I wanna see mini Death Star mesh nodes, X Wing routers and Millennium Falcon access points, dammit. Or hell, cross the multiverse and give me Borg Cube mesh nodes, complete with green shiny LEDs that actually indiacte network/hardware status.

It is rather disturbing to me that WiFi routers already look too much like the Replicators from Stargate SG-1.

Ah, these so-called SciFi routers.

Because a shocking amount of consumers buy things based purely on how they appear and the gamer adjacent aesthetic looks surprising and advanced to consumers. Unassuming business boxes are much harder to sell via the visual marketing

I couldn't agree more. It makes it difficult to attach my reputation to when making suggestions for hardware purchases.

if your rep depends so much on visual aesthetics then I'd say you don't have much rep to begin with. if someone trusts me they'll buy whatever I say regardless of how it looks, and likewise if I trust somebody to recommend a piece of hardware I know the aesthetics are irrelevant and they know more than I do about the specs compared to the competition.

It would be great if more companies adopted standardized shapes like the 10” mini-rack format.

> unholy blend of a cybernetic spider and a Knight Rider

I love the phrasing, we usually call this design language as transformers mating.

It looks like the deceptikon logo from above thou xD

It's a pretty functional design if you accept that the extruded antennae are necessary. They're really small, like half the footprint of my old Asus 6 antenna beast, and the fixed antennae are so much less fiddly. Finally, fast and one-click adguard home, what's not to like.

Right?

I guess they think consumers need them to look like this crap.

Because otherwise the Punx don't recognize their Cyber.

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