Serious question: Do the antennas actually make a difference?
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
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
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.
Hail Sata full of cables. hollow be thy port.
Eva from wall-e vs the galactic empire
I like the UFO and Coke can designs personally.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
I miss my old D-Link but I’m not about to start maintaining my own router -drivers- firmware.
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.
Sorry I was referring to the firmware on which the router operates. Misuse of industry terms and lingo on my part.
