• pHr34kY@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1331·
    10 months ago

    Ironically, it’s the innocent-looking white boxes that are hellspawn devices of pure evil that will wiretap your house, force you into a subscription service and have a 2-year planned obsolescence timebomb in it.

    Meanwhile anything that resembles an arachnid will let you do whatever you want, support every imaginable open standard, and work with community firmware that will still be supported a decade later.

    • Ann Archy@lemmy.worldEnglish
      22·
      10 months ago

      If they also crawled around my living room floor I would probably buy two and make them fight each other over AP privileges. May the strongest signal win.

    • XTornadoEnglish
      51·
      10 months ago

      Mikrotik have innocent enough boxes, although some are black but no subscription service, although it’s proconsumer so it’s not a easy device unless you know what are you doing or you watch a video for each thing you want to do 😅.

    • 🐍🩶🐢@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      10 months ago

      I don’t think that is true for Wi-Fi 6 routers. Are there any open firmwares for those? Those bastards at TP-Link removed features after a firmware update and I no longer have any visibility to anything that is going on my network. It will be relegated to access point soon, if I don’t chuck it at a wall in spite, after I figure this opnsense thing out.

    • Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      193·
      10 months ago

      Great if you happen to be or know an electrician, drywall repair expert, and painter. For most of us this isn’t very practical though. I do wish that ceiling router ports were standard on new builds at least and if you didn’t want to use them you could plug in smoke alarms instead.

      • wander1236@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        181·
        10 months ago

        There’s nothing stopping you from just plopping these on a table somewhere.

        The UFO has a pop-out notch on the rim so it can sit flat on a table or wall with a cable running out the side, and the can comes with multiple bottom attachments you can swap out depending on if you want it to rest on a table, be screwed into the side of something, or be mounted on top of a threaded bolt.

        I just chose the images that showed the shapes off. It’s not the only way they can be used.

        • NightAuthor@lemmy.worldEnglish
          4·
          10 months ago

          In my apartment my UFO is actually mounted to the little door of the in-wall network box, when the door is closed it points into the main portion of the apartment. Perfectly usable, and for pure speed the desktop is hardwired.

      • thehatfox@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        10 months ago

        Depending on how your home is constructed, installing ceiling mounted access points can be a lot easier than you might think.

        Most of these APs are powered by Power over Ethernet, so they only require one cable for both power and data.

        My current home is a bungalow, and installing multiple access points only required running some network cable round the loft and drilling a small hole in the ceiling for each AP - which mounts over the hole so it can’t be seen.

  • neidu2@feddit.nlEnglish
    786·
    10 months ago

    Neither.

    19" rack mount router and switch supplying PoE to a proper wall mount access point that allows for vlan tagging per ssid.

    I’m so done with consumer grade crap. After my WRT54G had to be replaced, nothing quite measured up unless I went for industrial grade hardware.

    • deweydecibel@lemmy.worldEnglish
      351·
      10 months ago

      Consumer grade has taken a nosedive but it’s head and shoulders over what the ISPs give out now.

      I had to install a new gateway for my mom the other day, the one supplied by Spectrum. I haven’t looked at or touched one of these things in years, I had no idea what they were like now.

      I opened the box, set it up, plugged it in, saw that the only information the display gives customers now are the words “Power” and “Online”, unplugged it, put it back in the box, and told Mom “I love you too much to let this in your home. I’ll buy you a modem.”

      I didn’t even get to the part where apparently you have to use an app to change the password, and the admin panel is not truly accessible anymore.

      • datelmd5sum@lemmy.worldEnglish
        7·
        10 months ago

        I found out that ISP provided crap can do one thing OK. I have an ISP provided cable modem / router / wifi doing only the cable modem part and bridging the connection to a MikroTik router. Then I have another ISP provided router / wifi only doing the wifi part, again bridged to the MikroTik.

        Both the ISP provided boxes were crashing pretty consistently when they were doing routing, firewall, wifi etc. (torrenting with a VPN while watching a 4K stream over wifi would just melt the box) but when they’re only doing one thing they’ve been working fine.

      • neidu2@feddit.nlEnglish
        5·
        10 months ago

        The only eyesore in ly setup is my ISPs router, which is only used as a fiber modem at this point. I tried to probe my ISPs customer service for any info regarding the protocol in use, but I got nowhere with them. One of these days I might fire up wireshark to see how it’s connecting so I can replace it with my own, but that’d involve downtime.

      • noobnarski@feddit.deEnglish
        2·
        10 months ago

        My small ISP (in Germany) gives out AVM Fritzbox, and they may not be as good as ubiquity, but they are certainly not crap. The routers of the bigger ISPs have even gotten pretty good as well over here and no one is ever forced to use the ISP supplied box in Germany anyway.

        I just use the Fritzbox as a router and disabled the WiFi, which I do with Ubiquity APs. In one or two years I may have had to restart it once or twice, that is good enough for me.

      • neidu2@feddit.nlEnglish
        4·
        10 months ago

        I haven’t used Unifi myself, but from what I’m hering, that’s an apt description.

      • IHawkMike@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        10 months ago

        Yeah, they’re not the best compared to something like an Aruba, but they tend to have a lot of enterprise features that are mostly functional. You just have to play the firmware lottery sometimes with the APs especially. The switches are a bit less finicky. I would never touch their firewalls.

        • ramble81@lemm.eeEnglish
          21·
          10 months ago

          I have their USG firewall and it’s been rock solid for years. Looking forward to its successor.

    • ɐɥO@lemmy.ohaa.xyzEnglish
      2·
      10 months ago

      I fucking hate it. Replaced my shitty Isp router with a proper Opnsense box and I love it

    • freamon@endlesstalk.orgEnglish
      2·
      10 months ago

      I bought a Cisco enterprise router and switch (2nd hand) - the level of available configuration is great but the noise of the fans started to do my head in. I need to figure out how to get them wired up somewhere I can’t hear them all the time.

      • fatalError@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
        4·
        10 months ago

        There is more than 1 way to get that level on config without having a loud energy hungry rack mounted hw… Pfsense or openwrt are just 2 of them. Drop them on a good arm device or power efficient x86 minipc and u get the best of both worlds. You lose on the seamless updates, but unless you are some high profile or paranoic person, no APT will target that 0 day in your network…

      • neidu2@feddit.nlEnglish
        1·
        10 months ago

        When I bought my house a couple of years ago I decided early on that I want a rack tucked away somewhere. Noise was part of the reason.

      • atx_aquarian@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        10 months ago

        I’ve maintained my own LANs for decades and don’t think I’ve ever seen or heard of a router driver. They just have little web servers on them that you log into for your settings.

        • doctorcrimson@lemmy.worldEnglish
          3·
          10 months ago

          Sorry I was referring to the firmware on which the router operates. Misuse of industry terms and lingo on my part.

          • atx_aquarian@lemmy.worldEnglish
            2·
            10 months ago

            Oh, ok, gotcha. Here’s my instructions for doing it on a Ubiquiti Dream Machine. Not bad at all!

            Edit: Ohhhhh, you’re talking about not doing WRT54G on a D-Link again, not not getting some enterprise-grade stuff. I think I’m on the same page now, sorry!

    • grue@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      10 months ago

      I’ve got a rack and PoE ceiling- and wall-mounted access points, but my router is still a TP-Link Archer C7 running OpenWRT.

      Got a recommendation? I’d like to have a (cheap-ish) rackmount router running something open-source like OpenWRT or OPNsense, but even “small office”-class stuff that comes in regular metal rectangular chassis is much less than 19" wide and doesn’t come with ears for rack-mounting.

      • neidu2@feddit.nlEnglish
        1·
        10 months ago

        I’m picky with many things, but routers isn’t one of them. I tend to scavenge leftovers at work. Right now I have a Fortigate 101E

        • TwitchingCheese@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          10 months ago

          I too would not be picky with a free $4,000 router, especially one that doesn’t lock fucking everything down without licensing (thanks Cisco).

          • neidu2@feddit.nlEnglish
            2·
            10 months ago

            Fortigate does have licensing, but that’s only for support, which affects firmware downloads. The company account that I use for those has the last hardware license expiring this april. The hardware will continue to work, but I will have no way of updating it if a security hole were to be discovered.

            As far as running license costs go, I have to admit that I kind of like Meraki, even though I am ideologically opposed to hardware subscriptions. It make management of loads of hardware much easier, and when a VPN goes down I can stull teoubleshoot it remotely.

            Also, I will concede that the router I use is severe overkill. I could’ve gotten away with much less, but I’d rather rwcycle leftovers from work than see it end up on a trash heap. Ask me how I have so many rack mounted servers.

            • TwitchingCheese@lemmy.worldEnglish
              2·
              10 months ago

              Ubiquiti’s Unifi and TP-Link’s Omada are certainly trying to edge in on Meraki from the Prosumer level (and not having to pay license fees to unlock hardware you already have is a plus). They both have local control hardware / software too if you don’t trust them with your data.

              Fortinet was on my shortlist, along with OPNsense’s prebuilt hardware. Ended up just sticking with Mikrotik and getting 10Gb going for less than half the price though. Might be overkill but sure makes my media server and backups faster. Now if only Windows could actually saturate the link and not struggle to get 5Gb

    • /home/pineapplelover@lemm.eeEnglish
      1·
      10 months ago

      I was considering this but I didn’t feel it was worth my time and money. I just bought an asus soho router for $60 and waiting for it to come. Planning on outting openwrt on it and it should perform just fine. I don’t need to cover a huge area at home so I don’t see any issues with it.

      Doing a proper network would cost me like $100 for the router and another $100 something for the wap. Not including my time wiring and setting everything up.

  • PsychicPsquirrel@lemmy.worldEnglish
    66·
    10 months ago

    Or you could choose one with wings.

    https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/461b576f-37a8-4f7f-a040-29f6ed891414.jpeg

    This one does have beam forming antennas. I don’t know if that feature helped, but this router works in my long narrow apartment in a congested area where other routers failed.

  • mlg@lemmy.worldEnglish
    531·
    10 months ago

    That rounded white box is a POS At&T locked down fiber modem/router which they patch biweekly at 3am without your control because they don’t want people hacking their devices to change the DNS server or anything useful.

    It wouldn’t be a problem if AT&T let you use your own fiber ONT but they don’t which is technically illegal but no one has sued them yet because they are a billion dollar company.

    Thankfully the workaround is to grab a supported ONT, upgrade to 2.5g or higher fiber speeds so they are forced to use XGS-PON, then swap in your ONT with some cloned IDs and downgrade back to whatever plan you want. This all allegedly works because businesses that use AT&T as their ISP also don’t want to pay money for a proprietary piece of junk, and they have enough power to throw around to demand AT&T allow them to use their own fiber hardware.

    • mrmanager@lemmy.todayEnglish
      9·
      10 months ago

      Depends on your firmware. You can install FreshTomato firmware on these things and enjoy a much better experience with many more features and higher stability.

    • Kilgore Trout@feddit.itEnglish
      71·
      10 months ago

      The one on the right is ASUS, they make pretty good quality hardware and software and don’t spy on you, at least for what concerns routers.

      • aniviaEnglish
        8·
        10 months ago

        You are talking about the same Asus that uses proprietary Trend Micro spyware on all its routers? At least it can be disabled, but by default it is enabled and spies on you

          • jkrtnEnglish
            2·
            10 months ago

            I assume if it can be flashed it can take OpenWRT too? I like the aesthetic, but IDK I think I’d rather not support them at all if they put spying software on their stock installs.

            • Kilgore Trout@feddit.itEnglish
              3·
              10 months ago

              I have a ASUS RTAX53U running OpenWrt 23.05.

              Here you can find a list of devices supported by the current version.

        • Kilgore Trout@feddit.itEnglish
          8·
          10 months ago

          They are obligated to publish the routers’ firmware source code under GPL-2 since it’s primarily based on Tomato and OpenWRT firmware.

          You can find the respective source code on the Support page of every router, tab Driver & Utility > Driver & Tools > OS: Others.

          If the version you find there does not match the last published firmware, you can send them an e-mail.

  • esc27@lemmy.worldEnglish
    26·
    10 months ago

    Can I get the one on the right with four antenna and a black pyramid in the middle? “Ancient Spirits of Ethernet, transform this weak signal… to Wi-Fi, the Ever-Streaming!”

    • jet@hackertalks.comEnglish
      352·
      10 months ago

      Short answer no.

      Long answer: Mimo designs benefit from different array configurations with known and well placed antenna spacing. So once you hit “good enough” there isn’t much of a benefit… But the loosy Goosy any direction antennas above the Xtreme routers… No, not at all

    • Bassman1805@lemmy.worldEnglish
      18·
      10 months ago

      Best guess: each antenna is optimized for a different carrier frequency and splitting traffic between antennae allows the designer to use multiple, lower-cost parts on each data stream rather than a single, higher-cost part that can handle one antenna dealing with all the traffic.

      Multiple antennae carrying the same frequency can make a difference, but consumer electronics where the end user has control over the angle of the Antennas likely isn’t precise enough to make use of the potential benefits.

      If the antennae were very precisely positioned and had very precise phase offset, the full array could be used to have very tight control over polarization…which really doesn’t matter in a home wifi environment.

      OR! It’s just for looks.

    • crusa187English
      161·
      10 months ago

      Depends if they can be mapped to different channels/frequencies, then it’s possible you get more throughput assuming there isn’t some bottleneck elsewhere. afaik more antennae for the same connection, at essentially the same location, doesn’t make a difference

    • st3ph3n@midwest.socialEnglish
      6·
      10 months ago

      I have both. The white soft one is Comcast’s shit forced into bridge mode, and the satanic altar is mine. Had to take their modem/gateway to get unlimited data from them.