• pHr34kY@lemmy.world
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    5 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.world
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      5 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.

    • 🐍🩶🐢@lemmy.world
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      5 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.

    • XTornado@lemmy.ml
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      5 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 😅.

      • Linkerbaan@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        Microtik looks very expensive for what they offer. What are their actual advantages of something like an ASUS?

        • barsoap@lemm.ee
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          5 months ago

          Try to get a carrier-grade router with 20 SFP+ cages from Asus, Mikrotik’s higher end plays in the same league as Cisco or Huawei.

          Mikrotik’s lower-end hardware isn’t really much more expensive than what you get from Asus but runs the same carrier-grade software and will never, ever, let you down when it comes to things such as packet throughput. The reason you don’t see OpenWRT images often for their devices isn’t because they’re locked down but because people prefer their software.

        • AnarchoSnowPlow
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          5 months ago

          Generally speaking I’ve found them to be far cheaper than similarly specced hardware, for the sfp+ and multigig hardware. (I’ve also seen benchmarks that show they can’t handle the same kind of total throughput though either)

          • Linkerbaan@lemmy.world
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            5 months ago

            For price-value I only knew of Ubiquity, which also offers these kinds of products at supposedly more reasonable prices than the majority of the market.

            Mikrotik seems to be older than Ubiquity but hasn’t shown up on my radar for good value professional/prosumer equipment whereas Ubiquity has gotten a lot of hype a few years ago. I wonder what the difference is between the two

            • barsoap@lemm.ee
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              5 months ago

              Maybe because you’re not European? Mikrotik is Latvian, Ubiquiti from the US.

              • Linkerbaan@lemmy.world
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                5 months ago

                I remember Ubquity making a huge impression on the scene being touted as “professional hardware for a better price”. I have never really heard that hype around Mikrotik. I’ll keep them in mind though

                • AnarchoSnowPlow
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                  5 months ago

                  I’m not European either. I was just looking for cheap fast hardware. I have a ubiquiti access point, it beats the pants off anything else I’ve used before. That said, I will never buy ubiquiti management equipment because they keep having either security issues or outages that affect your ability to administrate the network in the same room.

    • Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.works
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      5 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.works
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        5 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.world
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          5 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.

      • GBU_28@lemm.ee
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        5 months ago

        Huh? For most homes this is like, 1 tub of spackle, a sample of paint and a paper towel

      • thehatfox@lemmy.world
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        5 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.

  • PsychicPsquirrel@lemmy.world
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    5 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.world
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    5 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.today
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      5 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.it
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      5 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.

      • anivia@lemmy.ml
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        5 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

          • jkrtn@lemmy.ml
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            5 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.it
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              5 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.it
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          5 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.

  • 🇰 🔵 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 ℹ️@yiffit.net
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    5 months ago

    Like early wifi routers weren’t also stupid looking? I don’t think I have ever had one that fit properly anywhere because of their odd shapes and/or antennae, and I’ve had wifi since 98 or 99.

    As an aside: While I was working for a WISP, I came into possession of some older Ubiquity antennas and I used a couple to blast my home network’s wifi across my small town so I could use wifi on my phone pretty much anywhere within 3 miles of my house. Shit was rad as fuck.

  • esc27@lemmy.world
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    5 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.com
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      5 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.world
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      5 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.

    • crusa187@lemmy.ml
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      5 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
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      5 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.