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.

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.

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

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.

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.

The "trash can Mac" made this phrase permanent

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.

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

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...

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.

> 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.

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

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.