Is it really? Apple makes some wildly successful products, and will apparently put more focus on those. Seems fine. I personally found out that Apple makes (made) routers through this post, so maybe they're not a huge deal.
I think there's two possible problems with their strategy
1) ecosystem. the more co-operating products you have, the more likely you are to keep people in your ecosystem. There's been quite a few posts here about people who are/were "all apple". That only works when Apple produce a wide enough range of products. As they shrink, there's a greater risk of more people going to other ecosystems.
2) "all your eggs in one basket". Obviously Apple are focusing on iOS devices and rightly so they're massively profitable. However focusing in one place leaves you at risk if that product line declines and you can't diversify fast enough. Tech. history is littered with examples of this like Blackberry.
AirPorts worked really nicely when consumer Wifi stations were rather hit-and-miss than foolproof (anecdotally).
Now wireless stations are bundled with all sorts of broadband service accounts, and given Apple's market share, are probably pretty much expected to "just work" with their hardware.
Aren't wireless routers now just a commodity that incorporates very little chances to add actually value adding features?
It's about the ecosystem. in fact, it's about the perception of the ecosystem.
All of the changes - decaying Mac Pro, mediocre gimmicky MBP, end of this, end of that, confusion over Titan, Watch, which no one cares about - all suggest that Apple has lost the concept of brand and product synergy.
It looks trivial but it's actually fatal, because it undermines the perception that when you buy Apple you're buying Special.
Now you're just buying. And when a company is selling overpriced commodity hardware, it absolutely needs to convince its customers that it's offering more than that.
When Steve Jobs came back, he killed off a bunch of accessories - printers, cameras, Newton, etc etc. Apple isn't in dire straits as they were them, but just like how back then their printers and cameras weren't innovative, neither are their routers now
Killing off accessories is fine. But if they're not focusing on that anymore, and no new Macs in ages, what the hell ARE they focusing on?
I literally burst out laughing when I read your comment, which seems kinda apt with the new MBP, although we know it's not what Apple is focusing on. :)
P.S.: I realize this comment may not be in line with HN etiquette
> just like how back then their printers and cameras weren't innovative, neither are their routers now
Nothing Apple has done lately is really innovative. Their value is taking something the "commodity" manufacturers already do, and doing it right (for more money). That's precisely where the Airport Express sat. Pay a little more, never have to worry about it.
Same with phones, same with computers, same with tablets.
Sadly, that's the truth. I have a Mac mini from 2007 that's still going good, but I didn't feel that the 2012 model would be a good replacement when it came out. The 2014 model was a disaster beyond that (down to dual core, no more user upgradable RAM or HDD). Short of a miracle, the Mac Mini is dead or will be updated with something even worse than the outdated and expensive model still on sale.
It honestly makes me wonder if I should stick with Apple. Every product I loved apart from the iPad, iPhone and Macbook Pro has been cancelled or ignored and these 3 remaining products are updated with such small increments that I don't think Apple is leading us into the future of computing.
That's just too sad. I was thinking recently how my 3 year old AirPort express was the best router I've owned. These routers were always super easy to configure and I remember maybe one reboot in its lifetime... it powers:
2 MBP pros;
2 iPhones
1 Apple TV
1 Roomba 980 cleaning bot
1 Footbot - Air quality monitoring
1 Apple Watch
1 Sony PS4
... everything working flawlessly
Surprising you found them stable. I have another router to be the best of the best: Asus Dark Knight (pricey). Try giving it a try. I must have gone through 6 budget routers before splurging on this one. Two restarts in 6 years.
You would be shocked at how good an ASUS router is comparably. I always have people tell me I have over killed my houses wifi but the speed are awesome and I own a home built in 1894 and has plaster walls.
I don't understand how a router can be simpler then just typing in the password unless your trying to accomplish something more complex.
Yup, and that trick used to be "go buy an Airport". Now the trick will be "go read a bunch of web pages and hope you make a good choice". I'm not looking forward to it when my AirPort Extreme dies.
I bought an Ac66u a while back (nicknamed dark knight). The thing died after 1 month. I didn't have the time or inclination to bother to return the thing (Asus support was entirely unhelpful). Sat like a dead spider in my networking cabinet as I put my Airport back into service.
If Apple is indeed abandoning the router space I'm a bit disappointed and worried that leadership doesn't understand the basic needs of their average brand loyal customers.
Same here. I was very reluctant to buy an Apple-branded router, but after going through half a dozen routers in just a few years, I figured I'd give it a shot. I have had the same router now for 4 years. I was just thinking the other day about how amazing it is that I have had to restart it only once or twice in its lifetime and it's still going strong. It's so reliable that if something is wrong with the WiFi, I immediately suspect the internet service.
“People think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on. But that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I'm actually as proud of the things we haven't done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.”
I'm sorry. I don't like this argument either (it's used for every minor annoyance related to Apple) and I'm not comfortable ascribing intentions to a deceased person.
Ugh, this is the first news that I've seen that I feel is really bad. Monitors were ok, that seemed understandable since they were for professionals to go with the mac pro. Apple's monitors were at best "prosumer".
Wifi though has always been a very big PITA for consumers, and Apple's hardware/software integration has always been a better bet for ease of configuration, and honestly, reliability.
The optimist in me hopes that maybe they'll have something better for us, or are making an acquisition to replace their current product lineup completely.
The pessimist in me thinks that maybe they're leaving this market to avoid needing to develop hardware that meets its publicly stated standards for protecting consumer privacy. Potentially they have been approached/mandated to enable some kind of backdoor in it, and they chose to stop producing it, rather than comply. /tinfoil_hat
On the other hand, consumers seem to be better at configuring wireless routers today than 5 years ago. I rarely see an unsecured router with the default configuration any more ("linksys" SSID, no password).
I did enjoy using Apple's wireless routers, though.
I don't know that people are getting better at it, rather it seems to be because routers are coming with randomized passwords printed on a sticker on the unit itself. And it's anecdotal but my neighborhood is littered with base Comcast & AT&T SSIDs.
That's certainly what happened in my country - people started getting pre-configured wireless routers with their ISP contract. Nowadays a good third of them even have Fonera enabled, which is nice.
I think the set up has become a bit more consumer friendly and appliance like, which may in part lead to better security. Most of the major vendors are even pretty good about disabling commonly exploited functions of older firmwares; there are fewer and fewer routers that are vulnerable to reaver by default now because the WPS function is either disabled or removed completely. This of course doesn't address lesser known more threatening holes, but still it's a start.
But I do concur - I will miss the ease of the Airport tech (not so much the most recent prices though).
I've had Apple base stations. I don't anymore. Not because I don't like the Apple base stations, but because I just don't care. I almost never interact with my wireless router (the only time I've done it in the past year was to accomplish something that the Airport Express can't even do). I didn't find my current wireless router to be any more difficult to set up than the Airport was.
Also: don't most people get their wireless service from their cable router now?
I don't think Apple has a comparative advantage in providing wireless routers. That's not to say that there's no advantage to be found in producing excellent wireless routers: there are companies trying to do this today, but Apple isn't one of them.
I am not the one you asked, but I have become a fan of Ubiquiti's ER-X due to the performance of the small queue, its low cost and Swiss Army knife like feature set. I have not run into anything that it cannot do yet (unless pushing more than 180Mbps through the smart queue counts).
I'm also not who you asked but I'll jump in anyways.
I'm a network engineer and use pretty much "enterprise" gear across the board at home. A couple of years ago, though, I yanked out my Cisco ASA firewall (connecting my home network to my ISP) and replaced it. I'm now using a (expensive) "RouterMaxx 1106" [0] (PDF) as my home router. It was designed for and shipped with Mikrotik RouterOS but I replaced that with pfSense, initially, and then switched, later, to OpenBSD. It Just Works(TM).
The hardware, for the most part, doesn't matter too much. The software you choose is much more important, in my opinion. Choose something that can be tuned and locked down as needed and, critically, gets updated regularly. I'm a "CLI guy" and quite comfortable with OpenBSD and a terminal so this setup works for me. For those desiring a point-and-click web-based method of administration, pfSense, OpenWRT, and similar may better serve their needs.
n.b.: FWIW, my router doesn't provide Wi-Fi, only (6 x 1000 Mbit) wired Ethernet. I have been using an Aerohive AP330 access point but am currently replacing it with a Ubiquiti Unifi AP AC PRO.
> Also: don't most people get their wireless service from their cable router now?
I think this is the key part: thinking about my friends and family, over the last few years everyone has switched to using the box which came from their ISP except for a few IT people and gamers.
This is generally a good thing since the ISPs are significantly more likely to install security updates, and WiFi speeds exceeded the average home internet connection somewhere around a decade ago so the benefits to buying your own are fairly limited for most people.
> WiFi speeds exceeded the average home internet connection somewhere around a decade ago
Depends where you live. There are ISPs that will get you 250 Mbit downstream via FTTH, but their WiFi supports only 802.11n over 2.4 GHz only. When your neighbors get similar setup, you will not get over WiFi anything that approaches your Internet speed.
ISPs failing to provide security updates is a specific reason I'm worried about this, I felt Apple was more likely to care about security than ISPs. There's an Australian ISP that issued exactly one firmware patch for the router they sold, and hasn't updated it in over 2 years. Not even post-Mirai....
I kept getting notices from my ISP that I was downloading HBO torrents. Turns out my ISP supplied router was compromised. So much for regular security updates!
That's not what I said: they're more likely to install updates than the average user. It doesn't matter if Apple releases an update if the user just ignores it, and the support lifetime for these devices tends to be years shorter than the interval where most people will pay for a new device.
My go-to fix for crappy wireless for friends and family is to plug a $50 BestBuy access point into the piece of shit Comcast ships. Night and day.
People think they need repeaters, cable installation, all kind of expensive and worrying projects... nope, just use a real wireless router instead of the Comcast box.
> Also: don't most people get their wireless service from their cable router now?
Yes they do, but they shouldn't.
The problem is that you place your all-in-one cable-modem-router-AP at the point where the cable enters your house. This is unlikely to be the ideal position to place an access point.
For example, my fiber connection enters my home at one of the corners of the house. You want your AP in a central location.
I tend to agree. But in my house now, a three story, the AP is in the basement at the corner of the house. Surprisingly, I have zero trouble with all my devices connecting to it.
Are you thinking of other issues besides signal strength?
Exactly, there's almost no benefit to them to push the state of the art as they're not an end user product at present (whether or not that should be the case is up for debate, but since most people don't care).
Apple is nudging consumer behaviour with each product transition - I wouldn't be entirely surprised if we start seeing more devices with mobile data built in (say, with an antenna behind the logo or behind the Touch Bar).
Who cares? Who uses these? You're provider gives you a free router when you sign up and you plug it in, type in your password on your devices and boom you never think or worry about it again.
There is no need for Apple to be in this market, there is no problem to be solved for 99.9% of people.
I use one (Time Capsule), and have used them for years. They have a pretty convincing value add story... let alone the fact that I also have a few Express stations around the place for music streaming.
I had a router from BT that despite having won awards, could not resolve its external IPv4 address internally. It knew what its external address was and knew that it had to DMZ everything to an internal address, but if you attempted to resolve the external address (expecting it to go to your DMZ'd machine), it'd fail.
I also had a router from another UK ISP that would crash and hang if you sent it a malformed IP packet (ie put its respond-to address as itself); it'd go mental replying to itself and then processing the messages it sent to itself. Not quality.
The EE broadband router I had would hand off its internal web admin session to external visitors if they connected whilst a web admin session was in progress. Yes, let's hand our internal web admin session page to an external visitor....
BT sent another hub that looked identical and worked correctly; underneath it was a Siemens instead of a Thompson I think.
So all in all, I have found that the ISP boxes were never really finished, and some (like Sky's box) needed rebooting periodically as I recall, so buggy too.
> I had a router from BT that despite having won awards, could not resolve its external IPv4 address internally. It knew what its external address was and knew that it had to DMZ everything to an internal address, but if you attempted to resolve the external address (expecting it to go to your DMZ'd machine), it'd fail.
to be fair, I've got $1000 cisco hardware that can't wrap the external IP like that...
> You're provider gives you a free router when you sign up and you plug it in, type in your password on your devices and boom you never think or worry about it again.
Usually, you don't even want to remove the PoS router you get from your ISP from it's box. In my experience no ISP ever gives away decent equipment, it's just the cheapest thing they could order in quantity.
Another issue with an ISP-issued router is that you have no idea what they did and can do with it. I know of several ISP's that have full remote access to the routers they hand out. Basically, you risk exposing your entire home network.
For Verizon Fios you have no choice. I mean sure you can disable the wifi of the router and use an access point like I do but you have to use their router at some point in the chain.
There are have been some guides to try to bypass the router and go strait to the OTN but it is extremely non trivial.
This is false if you're only using Fios for internet service. Verizon asked me if I was providing my own router, and I said yes. The tech who "installed" and activated my ONT confirmed that I was using my own router so that he could activate the ethernet port on the device. There was nothing to bypass—it fell within their expectations.
I hear it's a challenge to avoid the standard Verizon router if you also have TV or phone service through Fios.
It must be because I have TV through them because I literally begged them and offered other pricing to not use their router and they said it was not possible.
I also confirmed this a while back on some forums but perhaps they have changed this. It is good to hear you had success. Do you have a residential or biz plan?
They lied. With modern FiOS equipment, you just need a MoCA 2.0 bridge and for the ONT to be provisioned for ethernet. Their router can even be used as a MoCA bridge or run in an Ethernet configuration. There is at least one guy on Reddit who has the FiOS TV guide working without Verizon's router by doing that.
My own household used its own router with the Verizon router configured as a MoCA bridge almost exclusively from 2006 until 2015 when we cancelled FiOS TV in favor of an OTA TV antenna. There were a few brief periods of time where I tried having Verizon's router be the gateway router, but it turned out to be awful.
Expect to hear the CSR make vague references to advanced features being absent when saying that you want to use your own router over their advice to rent theirs. The only "advanced feature" that would be absent is Verizon's remote management backdoor.
Of course there is a need. Apple has always been one of the first to use new WiFi standards, the Airports made these transfer speeds non-theoretical. My three year-old Airport still beats my 2016 cable modem royally on 802.11 AC. And this is not one of those cheapo cable modems (basically the latest and greatest Fritz!Box).
A large chunk of Apple users that I know have an Airport or Time Capsule for these and other reasons.
some routers provided by ISPs also broadcast public WIFI networks that any customer of the ISP can use. Not something I'm interested in; the last thing I want is more frequency congestion around my house.
Who cares? Who uses these? Your provided gives you a free router when you sign up and you plug it in, type in your password on your devices and boom you never think or worry about it again.
There is no need for Apple to be in this market, there is no problem to be solved for 99.9% of people.
If you want a good router, and have a bit of time to spare, I think the best route is to buy a low power machine [1], or assemble one yourself and run BSD or Linux.
Hopefully, in the near future we can have this done with libre hardware. Cheap POWER stuff would be great.
I did just this in the 90s and into 2000s with an amd dx4-100, FreeBSD, two network cards and a hub. Best firewall I could have asked for, reports out the wazoo, and was very reliable. And it was all free!
I switched to AirPorts because they're plug and forget. I just want something that works with my other Apple gear. Doubly so when I'm doing tech support for friends and family.
$200 is reasonable, compared to all the time I've spent farting with other brands of WiFi routers, including whatever piece of crap my ISP sent me. Now what's the no-brainer WiFi router choice? ASUS something, Ubiquity (sp?)? Read some reviews, order what seems the best, marvel at the weird new mutant feature set... Oops, that's another afternoon wasted.
Oh darn, my offbrand WiFi router had another security exploit, 6 months ago, and I just found out. And so forth.
Hopefully the silver lining is Apple is anticipating metro WiFi (WiMax?), though I wish they were helping drive that transition. Like I had hoped Google was... Oh well.
> Now what's the no-brainer WiFi router choice? ASUS something, Ubiquity (sp?)? Read some reviews, order what seems the best, marvel at the weird new mutant feature set... Oops, that's another afternoon wasted.
Ubiquity. Or in general: stay away from consumer-grade network equipment.
It really is; I'm going to go buy one as a backup. I purchased the original first gen time capsule, and it ran for over two years straight without even rebooting the damn thing. Short of a hardware malfunction (which is exceedingly rare in my troubleshooting experience, but power surges happen..) they just work.
My Airport Extreme goes YEARS without me touching it. It took me a couple minutes to set up. I very much doubt that Ubi's ease of management or use is superior. Equal? Maybe. Superior? Nah.
Have you ever set one up? They are insanely easy to manage and use. Superior? Likely. Ubiquity has amazing software. I set up 2 edge routers recently, they never need to be restarted. Also, the newer firmware has really good setup wizards for the basics. Almost impossible to screw up.
We switched from the wirecutter's recommended AC router back to an older AirPort Extreme and everything got better immediately. I won't miss Apple's monitors because they cost way too much for what they offered, but Apple has been doing wireless right since they brought out the first airport (a friend of mine worked at Lucent at the time and they were excited that someone had finally shipped a usable implementation of their technology)
Ars Technica's article basically says good riddance, but if you go back to their original review observed that the AirPort Extreme crushes all competing routers on both ease of use and performance.
I agree! I have older airport express and airport basestations that have been running for years. I update the software every so often, but other than that never look at them. They truly just work.
I may look into the new google APs, so I can get the latest wireless speeds across the house.
there are lots of consumer grade routers just as good or better than Airports. Problem is finding them amidst the sea of absolute crap.
Option 1: look and see what all the DDWRT/tomato/etc... guys are suggesting. Chances are the hardware is decent, and you know it will have support for the good 3rd party firmwares if you ever want to try it.
Option 2: Abandon all consumer grade gear. Just get Ubiquity stuff.
Option 3: Google just released their routers (like last week), which support automatic mesh networking when you use multiple. Way too early to make a call, but its something to keep an eye on.
Why bother? My ISP gives me a decent router with built-in wifi. The wifi is N, but I wanted AC, so I bought a Netgear and put it in access point mode. Took all of 30 seconds.
If you don't trust your ISP provided firewall/router then you probably have bigger problems. Both big ISPs in my area offer to turn the router into a bridge-mode device I can plug into a box running pfsense if I desire it, but frankly, that sounds like a PITA. Their routers work well enough. I think going forward we will just buy access point, not routers. The router problem has been solved for a long time.
>Abandon all consumer grade gear. Just get Ubiquity stuff.
I'd argue Ubiquity is really consumer stuff, just small business friendly. Their performance, price, stability, etc isn't that much better than a Netgear in access point mode. They just have a java-based controller which is handy for managing multiple AP's. Inside, they're kinda crappy.
>Google just released their routers (like last week), which support automatic mesh networking when you use multiple.
Google wifi is actually a latecomer. You can get residential friendlier Ubiquity-style solutions via Orbi or Eero, which is what Google is copying here. I believe Google's 3-pack beats both on price currently.
edit: modems and routers are completely different cases/devices and performance/stability are different than money saving. Regardless, my ISP doesn't charge me for my modem, so there's no incentive for me to buy my own.
You're probably paying a monthly rental fee for the router/modem from your ISP. There's a good chance you'll save money in ~12 months or so if you buy instead of rent.
I used to get charged $10 a month for router/modem. Owned my cable modem now for 4 years with no problems and my router for 3. They have more than paid for themselves.
After I had fiber installed at my grandmother's apartment in Shanghai, I found a backdoor in router that China Telecom provided. It was similar with Verizon in the US where they have your wifi password and remote access for various things. Then there was Cablevision that turned every router that they provided to people in my area into an access point without permission. Beyond having creepy backdoors, ISP provided routers are junk. There is no good reason to use them.
As for Ubiquiti being consumer grade, it is like an Intel Xeon E3. It is the same chip that is used in consumer stuff with enhancements for reliability. For instance, Ubiquiti equipment supports grounding via STP Ethernet. It generally supports some variant of PoE and is meant to be mounted on walls and ceilings. There are even outdoor models. It also does not require a reboot on every change. In addition, there is a team of engineers working on making the firmware better and their customers are able to report problems to them. Then there are firmware features like VLANs, policy based routing, BGP, ping watch dogs and other things not found in stock firmware of consumer grade equipment.
> Then there was Cablevision that turned every router that they provided to people in my area into an access point without permission.
Comcast does this as well - if you are leasing the Comcast modem then you are putting out a pair of APs. One of them is a public Comcast hotspot. I think you can request that it be turned off however.
It is probably better in the long term to just buy your own modem, router, switch and AP. ISP provided equipment is always subpar in comparison to what you can buy from Newegg and all in one units are bad in general.
Absolutely - I think Comcast charges like $10-15 per month for the privilege of polluting my airwaves with their access point. You can pick up one of their "approved" modems off eBay for like $50, so it pays off in a handful of months. You tell them some hardware ID number, either a MAC address or same idea, and they can auto-provision it for you. Takes literally 5 minutes and you're online.
Right now I have a Cisco DPC3008, which I can't really complain about. I have a Buffalo Airstation Extreme 1900, which has been good so far apart from its minute-long reboot times. I thought I was getting a DD-WRT router though, didn't realize the standard version did not have a supported DD-WRT build.
I have to admit though - when a contractor ripped out the sidewalks and took out my cable, I was glad that my neighbors were running the hotspot. Took almost 3 weeks to get back online.
In Germany, Kabel Deutschland can and does regularly update your cable modem remotely. There's a even a list of "censored websites" pushed down to your own router. They provide a Fritzbox but it's slightly more locked down (feature-wise) than normal so you can't even use it to a full potential.
I bought an Airport and stuck it behind it to at least isolate our home network from this backdoored mess. Good to know that Ubiquity provide a reasonable replacement.
The problem is most of the router companies have now locked down their update mechanisms on newer hardware, per FCC request... (the FCC wanted to prevent bumping the wattage, but easiest path was to lockdown updates).
Asus was really nice for a while, one of the more open mfg's, my AC3200 unfortunately came out after the lockdown, and is unsupported... would love to get back to tomato-usb or similar.
Option 4: Use Ruckus equipment. I plan to switch from Ubiquiti equipment to Ruckus equipment because I was able to purchase a used Ruckus Zoneflex 7982 off eBay for $90 and I understand that it would allow me to use only 1 AP where I currently use 2.
I'm very happy with the eero APs I got a few months ago. Super simple to set up, auto-adjusting, auto-updating, auto-meshing. We have a big house and a lot of neighbor interference, and these are the first APs I've ever had that "just work".
I have owned three consumer routers the last three years, all of which required a reboot every few days in order to stay responsive. My problem with consumer routers isn't speed, easy of setup or need for mesh networking, but reliability.
I currently have a rock-solid Mikrotik hAP ac lite [1], which has not been rebooted once since I installed it in February. However, it only has an internal antenna, and devices in another room are constantly dropping out, so I'm considering something else, if I can retain the reliability.
If you really want high performance networking, use wired. It is stupid to connect a television set, for instance, via WiFi. You should plug in anything that doesn't move around, and leave the limited bandwidth WiFi for those who need it.
People won't listen though because in 2016 it seems most people think wires are ritually unclean.
Using a wired network for things that can be wired frees up capacity for mobile phones, tablets, and laptops. For instance, if you are moving files to and from a server, you get way better performance if the server is wired than if the server is wireless too because the server->hub and hub->client links interfere with each other.
Mesh networks are just going from the frying pan to the fire.
I am not saying that people "don't need wireless" but that if having a reliable WiFi network matters to you, the best way to speed up your WiFi network is to move anything that you can possible move to wired to free up bandwidth for WiFi.
That includes turning off the rouge access points that are created by printers, game consoles, phones, etc.
Noone is saying that, but there's very limited bandwith available in the air (especially in the 2.4GHz band). If you move datahungry devices like TVs, NAS, etc. off the air, you gain a lot of free spectrum for the phones and tablets.
Exactly. I have a few things wired in the house where they're actually close enough to a switch. But for phones and tables and laptops (we have several), wired is not an option.
This is also shitty news because I had very high confidence that an Apple router would not ship with any kind of malware or other crap I don't need. Now, I have to find something better, comparable in price, and works well with Mac household.. Sad face.
But when wifi is faster than 1Gbps, does it matter anymore? Obviously if you're talking servers and enterprise equipment, faster is better. But does my smart TV or iPad really need that extra little bit of speed? Netflix only streams as fast as my Internet connection, which is 60Mbps. I could have 15 devices on my network streaming Netflix each on their own dedicated Internet connection and still not saturate an 802.11ac router (theoretically).
I don't know anyone who even approaches the theoretical speed of any 802.11 technology. Your neighbors on the same channel reduce your bandwidth, and neighbors on channels which overlap yours raise the noise floor a lot. I have a Moto X Pure and a Ubiquiti Unifi AP AC Lite, and I should theoretically get 867 mbit/s. I never even approach that in practice, even if I'm in the same room. There are more than 30 available networks nearby when I look on my phone. Even if I achieved the theoretical rate, the bandwidth falls off a cliff once you leave the room, as 5ghz signals are significantly attenuated by walls. I can max out my internet (75 mbit) if I'm in the same room as my AP, but I can't stream 1080p content on the 5ghz if I have 2 walls between me and my AP.
That being said, the Apple APs are the fastest consumer-grade APs out there. If you are going to hit the theoretical maximum, an Apple AP is your best bet. I don't think streaming is where people notice issues with their internet though. In my experience people tend to notice issues in video games, skype, facetime, and other applications where there isn't a buffer to hide issues with dropped packets first.
Requiring a browser implies that the device has a full web stack on it, including one of Perl, PHP, or Node.js. That's the last thing I want on my WiFi router, or any router!
As annoying as it is for some, the configuration interface for Apple AirPort used a simple SNMP interface. Now, lots of SNMP software has had bugs and remote exploits, but all things being equal it's a much simpler interface to export and requires shipping less code, not least because it doesn't have to support a GUI, directly or indirectly.
That said, I always configure my WiFi router (AirPort or w'ever) in bridging mode and put them behind my gateway. And I try to disable any web GUI entirely if at all possible. People who use the built-in WiFi capabilities of their Cable or DSL modems are begging to be hacked.
> Requiring a browser implies that the device has a full web stack on it, including one of Perl, PHP, or Node.js.
Not really, CGI can be written in anything, shell scripting, C, whatever. But security-wise, it doesn't much matter the language because the programmers working on the web interfaces of such embedded devices rarely do a good job.
I think it is mostly because they don't understand how much better wired internet is than wireless. I've basically forced many people to connect their devices with Ethernet as a "temporary" measure to solve their problems. For the most part, every single person has decided to leave whatever it is connected. Almost all my friends rent too, which is a huge barrier to using wires, since the wires can't be hidden in the walls or ceilings.
One of the big things that people don't realize is that bandwidth of wireless is split between every device on that channel. So if you are streaming to your TV/roku/xbox/etc over wifi, you are killing the bandwidth for your laptop and phone as well. Plus, if you live in a city your wireless bandwidth is pretty much guaranteed to suck because every ISP includes wifi with their modems, destroying the noise floor. Comcast modems are a particularly notable example, as they have a "public" 2.4 ghz network in addition to the "private" 2.5 and 5 ghz networks. There are no fewer than 30 wifi networks available inside my house when I check on my phone, and I live in a row house with metal lathe under the plaster, which greatly attenuates wifi signals.
I think the biggest barrier to wiring things is that patch cables are incredibly expensive if you buy them at Best Buy, etc. Most non-technical people I know only own the patch cable that came with their modem. Once I get them wired up, they are astounded by how much faster their internet is. They don't have buffering issues, the internet doesn't drop randomly, and it just seems "faster" (which I attribute to lower latency). I toss extra patch cables in my Monoprice orders now and sell them to my friends at-cost. To be honest, it's partially for my own sanity as well, because watching Netflix at 480p on a 50/15 connection drives me nuts.
I think it is mostly because they don't understand how much better wired internet is than wireless. I've basically forced many people to connect their devices with Ethernet as a "temporary" measure to solve their problems. For the most part, every single person has decided to leave whatever it is connected.
Yes. Same here. Ethernet is an oddly underrated technology. And Monoprice is one of these things that nerds know about and no one else does. There may be other companies like that—someone above mentioned an enterprise router company that sells better stuff than most consumer companies. Yet I've already forgotten its name.
Probably Ubiquiti and the Edgerouter Lite. It's an amazing router, but it doesn't have an integrated switch like most consumer-grade routers. It's not quite as user-friendly either, but the performance is unmatched. It costs about ~$90 and can handle gigabit internet, and a billion packages per second. I bought one recently because I was having issues with bufferbloat and extreme latency with my run of the mill 75/15 internet service.
Ubiquiti also makes a great series of wireless APs that are worth checking out.
My network right now is a Edgerouter lite, 2 Unifi AP AC Lites, and a used Dell 2816 managed switch.
We had a Ubiquiti wifi router in-office that would constantly refuse to allow certain devices on, or randomly drop devices and not let them back on. Apparently it was a known issue between those routers and Apple laptops so I was told.
I could see that. Their implementation of zero-handoff is really strange. For instance, all the APs have to be on the same channel. I could see that causing issues.
I didn't even understand how much better my laptop's wireless could be than my wireless, much less Ethernet. I was using a WiFi repeater to get to the old WiFi router, and eventually got frustrated with the random disconnections/freezes and began messing around. I was shocked to see my Internet speed (speedtest.net) go up substantially with a new WiFi router, and then go up to a total of 6x when I cut out the repeater using a big directional antenna - and it still wasn't equal to the numbers I was getting from plugging directly into the router with an Ethernet cable. So now despite the bother, I'm just going to run 200-feet of Ethernet cable from the router to my laptop. I knew Ethernet was better than WiFi but if I had realized just how much, I would've bitten the bullet years ago.
I'm surprised a software developer doesn't know basic stuff like that a typical Ethernet connection is 1Gb/s, and WiFi around 20-200, depending on conditions.
This is like an engineer not knowing the mains voltage is 230V, or a baker not knowing about standard grades of flour.
I knew perfectly well that Ethernet goes up to 1000 megabit/sec and WiFi generally 50-200 megabit/sec, but my reasoning was that the LAN shouldn't matter because my ISP only gives us ~6 megabytes/sec (or ~45 megabit/sec) and as far as I knew, all possible configurations easily saturated that as my laptop and repeater were the only things on WiFi with no interference from neighbors. In performance, you usually focus on the weakest link, and here the weakest link (ISP/Internet) was by far weaker than the other links.
Apparently I was grossly wrong, and I still don't understand why I was wrong and why the changes made such a large difference. Something to do with network protocols and response to packet loss or something, I guess.
I'm not. Software developers are generally pretty ignorant of things like network latency. You often see things like caching used to improve n+1 database performance problems which doesn't really help when the cache is also on another machine.
I remember seeing an Ethernet like network that used infrared lasers bounced off of a particular spot on the ceiling. It should be possible to get multi-gigabyte rates out of something like that, and it should be immune to interference from the neighbors. For a game machine, you'd want to be careful where you placed the transmitter and the ceiling spot. Also, I wouldn't put it past a teenage competitive gamer to mess up a rival with an infrared laser pointed through a window.
One neeed not lift floorboards, or drill through floors and ceilings to run wires. What I have done in my apartment, and what friends have done in their houses is run the wires along the base or tops of walls, tucked out of the way. Then one need not worry about pets or vacuum cleaners getting at the wires to chew them up, or getting tripped up by wires laying loose across the floor. There's a 100' meter limit for copper cables for ethernet. In my experience, that's plenty for most homes and offices, even when running along the walls.
Google "nail in cable clips." A small nail makes a small hole but if you run the cable along a wooden baseboard or molding, the holes aren't really noticeable (not like a hole in the wall from hanging a picture). There are adhesive cable clips but I've never used them, they're probably more expensive especially if they're the "Command(tm)" adhesive that's supposed to come off cleanly.
If your rooms are carpeted, there is actually a gap between the baseboard and the floor. With care you can fit coax or cat5 in there no problem. It ends up completely hidden.
People seem not to be very rational about it though. I know people who spend $20K and several weeks redecorating the kitchen and yet they keep futzing around and complaining about poor internet connectivity in their house that a professional could fix for well below $1K.
While obviously not as good as Ethernet, the internet-over-power-cable (powerline) solutions aren't a terrible option.
In my apartment, the biggest issue I face is interference from other wireless routers. Because of this, the powerline performance is about 40% faster on my desktop (right above the router one floor) and much more consistent. It also does help with wireless congestion, and really helps with using my desktop as a PLEX server. Before, higher bitrates would cause serious issues, and now it just works.
I'm not sure if the tech has matured recently or I just had a good use-case for it, but it's miles better than WiFi. I'm using TP-Link's product.
One current high-speed option is a MoCA 2.0 network through the existing coax, which has bandwidth up to 1 Gbps. I have a MoCA adapter next to each TV, wire the television through Ethernet from the adapter, and hook up a WiFi repeater as well.
I'm a network engineer so I have a "proper" setup at home: fiber-to-the-home, enterprise-class network devices (access points, switches, etc.), and so on. We were at Best Buy a while back and, while browsing around, I saw some of these "powerline" adapters on the shelf and, mostly out of curiosity, decided to buy a pair [0] of them to see how well they worked; I was doubtful of the "1200 Mbps" claim on the box.
For testing, I plugged them into AC outlets along the same wall in the same room, with ~14 feet separating them. After getting them linked up (very simple), I connected laptops to each unit, manually assigned IP addresses to the laptops, and used iPerf [1] to run throughput tests.
I'll spare you my rant about them but peak speeds were extremely disappointing, just shy of 50 Mbps. I honestly didn't expect anywhere near the advertised 1200 Mbps but I was expecting speeds relatively close to what I can get over my existing wireless. 50 Mbps may be quite acceptable to some, especially if one's Internet connection isn't that fast, but it was far from acceptable for me. They would also randomly "freeze" or "pause" for 20-30 seconds at a time but I didn't really investigate that issue.
Yeah, they have been very unreliable in my experience as well. Totally not recommend.
Also the idea of willingly putting noise in the electrical grid seems sketchy to me. I used to live in a house where I could not get good noise-free audio because the line was not a pure sine wave and most consumer PSUs were crappy to let noise through.
I've had powerline everywhere in the house and ended up ripping it out and just putting in ethernet cables everywhere. Powerline is really great for 99% of users, but I wanted to stream games from one PC to another, and use Remote Play form my PS4 - and over powerline, packets just had some weird random latency from time to time, making local streaming impossible. It runs very smoothly over ethernet now.
Are you in your own house with some distance between you and your neighbors? In most apartment complexes you'll have about 30 overlapping wifi networks visible from your computer, so wifi reliability is very much not what you get in a less dense area.
I keep what devices I can on wired, but it's really not feasible for everyone or for all devices. I sometimes have to switch my phone over to LTE because the wireless sucks too much. There's obviously no ethernet port on that.
If you are happy with your system don't change it. If you're in a small apartment in a building that has a lot of metal in it, you are fine. If you are in a bigger house or an apartment building which is transparent to radio waves you are not so fine.
Lots of people are complaining about their WiFi and many are discovering that a $200 consumer router doesn't help. What does work is to accept the physics, get a wired router and a $80 ubiquiti access point and run a wire so the access point is in the center of your house.
Let's put it this way: the inverse square law means that if you put the router at the edge of your house, relative to the center, you are going to have a minimum signal strength dropped by a factor of 4; this is on top of any attenuation that you get from going through multiple walls.
Accept the laws of physics or you'll find that no amount of spending on your access point will make your system completely reliable for a wide range of devices.
This is why all attempts to sell differentiated WiFi routers have failed -- the one way you can differentiate yourself in terms of reliablity, never mind performance, is to site your access point correctly.
Everybody thinks the mesh network fairy will save them, but there is a name for mesh networks, and it is "radio interference".
You just said it was stupid. Then you said "If you are happy with your system don't change it." This is contradictory, and your first statement was just inflammatory.
I wouldn't listen because my wireless network works just fine, even without listening to such strange advice. :)
Can I push 1 Gbps from my phone to my other phone? No... but I don't need to. My TVs and other devices work just fine too (none of them need more than 10Mbps to be usable, even with stable HD streaming).
The few things that do need bandwidth are on a wired connection giving them a hefty 1 Gbps that isn't interfered with by anything.
No, I live in the 99% of America where ordinary people can afford more than 500 square feet of living space.
Also, my phone company refuses to upgrade so I am on high-latency DSL. When a packet gets dropped in my local network, it takes a long time to get a replacement from internet based services.
You don't need high bandwidth to use the internet reliably, but you do need low packet loss, and the effects of packet loss and high latency multiply with each other -- local packet loss is much more painful if your internet is slow than if it is fast. Thus having a reliable local network helps experienced performance, even if you have a 2Mbps internet connection.
That's 99% by volume, not by population, right? Because I would estimate that at least 5% of the US population both chooses to live in high-density urban areas—so must rent apartments—and cannot afford large ones, precisely because of how high-density (and therefore high cost-per-sq-ft) the local area is.
I am also in the 99% of America where ordinary people can afford more than 500 square feet of living space. I just have a good router and fiber to the home. :)
I suspect that your biggest problem is really just your terrible ISP. I've had that problem before too, but my current one is great (and local).
Having a big house doesn't mean that you can't use Wifi, it just takes more planning and care in placement of the nodes.
I serve my 1200 sq ft condo with a single node, and it gets good coverage throughout the space, including the front/back patios.
My parent's 2400 sq ft house took 2 nodes in the attic + one in the back of the garage to cover the back yard.
They can hit their ISP's 150mbit/second cap from anywhere in the house or yard.
They use tablets almost exclusively and though dad still uses a laptop from time to time, he has no desire to plug it into ethernet, so a wired network wouldn't really be useful for them.
> No, I live in the 99% of America where ordinary people can afford more than 500 square feet of living space.
If I crunched the numbers correctly, roughly 2.5% of the US population lives in NYC alone. If you add in Boston, DC, San Francisco and other expensive cities I'd bet you can break 10% of the population in the core expensive cities alone.
I game on it as well. Granted, I'm not so big into FPS that a trivial increase in latency matters that much. The times that I do play FPS games, they are fine, though.
Pulling cable simply isn't an option in many houses, particularly in Europe. It really isn't very unusual here to live in a >400 year old house. If you don't have conduits or accessible cavity spaces, it can cost thousands of dollars to pull cable. I'd have to replaster and repaint practically every room in my house. A mix of Powerline and WiFi is a far more practical proposition, even if it's occasionally unreliable.
I'm in the US but my house is still ~200 years old. I've had a couple of major renovations done and have had networking cables pulled when walls were opened up anyway for electrical and other reasons. (WiFi was less widespread and mature at the time.) I added speaker cables as well. But barring real issues with using wireless in conjunction with Powerline or whatever, I'd never want to open up walls just for the purpose of adding Ethernet cables.
You could do a wireless point to point bridge in most places where running a cable is difficult. It is much more reliable than relying on an omnidirectional wireless access point over that distance.
Do you have data to back up this claim? In my experience, the reliability of the hardware has nothing to do with the antenna and everything to do with the software running on it.
Collisions between a directional link at short distance and other things using the spectrum are minisicule. It is like using megaphones to hold a conversation at a distance of say 10ft. It does not matter whether you are in a crowded area with everyone talking. The megaphones will drown out everything else. Using omnidirectional antennas is trying to talk without with out the megaphones. The difference in signal strength is what makes the wireless link with directional antennas more reliable than the one with omnidirectional antennas.
Personally I've run CAT5 when I've added sockets or rewired after moving in. I've yet to own a house, esecially older, that's not been greatly lacking enough sockets and I don't want everything hanging off an 8 way adaptor.
With wood floors you can usually avoid much impact and just run cables under the floorboards.
I don't understand how Americans complain about non-hidden cables, but live with crap like exposed conduits in the hallways, exposed circuit breakers in rooms, and ten layers of ugly paint over everything.
I think you answered your own question! I'm already at a breaking point of "mess" just by virtue of living in this (relatively speaking, pretty decent) apartment. The less mess I'm adding to it, the better.
Many people don't listen because their stuff works good enough on wireless. If wiring is already in place, or trivial to set up (e.g. because the PC is next to the router) they'll do it, but I can understand that they don't care about the effort if they don't see a benefit. In my experience, people that actually have issues with their WiFi are easily sold on cabling, as are those that really want performance. If stuff doesn't work, tolerance to spending money or ugly cables laying around goes up a lot.
I don't listen because I don't want to drill holes in my nice hardwood floors, my house is 2 story so running a cable up the wall isn't feasible, and cutting holes in my wall every few feet doesn't seem so smart either.
What's wrong with expecting WIFI to work well enough to enjoy low latency high definition/4k content?
> What's wrong with expecting WIFI to work well enough to enjoy low latency high definition/4k content?
You can totally do that in rural areas. I'm talking at least 1/4 mile separation between houses.
If you're not in that kind of area and you still expect it, it's because you don't understand the physics. I don't mean that as an insult, just a statement of fact. I went to school for electrical engineering and that statement you made above is laughable for anyone who knows the trade. To me, a similar statement might be "Why can't I have a car that makes 1000 HP, gets 100 MPG and costs $10k?" Yes someday that might be a reality but with the tech we have now, it's definitely not.
Bandwidth over the air is fixed and it's split between everyone who is within "earshot" and similar to how it eventually gets impossible to hear anyone at a party once the room is packed and everyone is talking, so it goes with wireless. There's just not enough spectrum to go around. That's why people use wires; every wire has (roughly) a whole spectrum all to itself. Pull 100 wires? Get 100x bandwidth. Put up 100 wireless transmitters? Get 1/100 the bandwidth on each one. The math there heavily, heavily favors wires. Ethernet, coax, fiber, whatever. If you make a new signal propagation domain you can use as much of it as it'll allow you. If you use the big signal propagation domain that everyone has access to, prepare to share.
To play devil'a advocate, a Ruckus Zoneflex R710 ought to work well in such places.
Also, I have gotten wifi working well in non-rural areas using Ubiquiti Unifi AC Lite APs. In suburban New York, a couple of them blanket my home. In my grandmother's Shanghai apartment in a building that is a mix of concrete and plaster, just 1 is sufficient (although for a much smaller volume), despite dozens of nearby APs. Admittedly, I moved to 5GHz there because I was literally the only one using it, but 2.4GHz had worked fine when I tried it. Peak throughout is higher on 5GHz due to higher channel widths though.
I might make an analogy: "I use a dog whistle and no matter how loud people are talking, my dog always hears it"
OK, now take your dog to a place full of dogs and other dog whistles. See how well it works.
Once the spectrum gets noisy, interference happens. Just because you found a quiet spot in the spectrum doesn't mean that spectrum sharing isn't a physical reality anymore. It just means you found some to keep all to yourself! Until someone else starts using 5GHz too.
I said that I was able to use 2.4GHz reliably despite it being crowded. I only switched to 5GHz because I noticed no one was using it and I saw higher bandwidth on it from 5GHz 802.11ac supporting higher channel widths than 2.4GHz 802.11n supports.
In fairness, I had made tweaks to iwlwifi's kernel module options in order to have usable wifi on my laptop. Until a year ago, I was accustomed to have a hellish experience in congested areas until I turned off Bluetooth coexistence support in the iwlwifi driver. That feature would almost always cause severe packet loss on my T520 in crowded environments even when there did not appear to be any Bluetooth traffic.
Anyway, it is possible to get wifi working well for certain workloads in crowded environments. Making it work well in general might require better drivers and better equipment than one might have at first though. For example, I understand that ath9k was a disaster when it was first made, but it is fairly decent now. I ran an AP off an ath9k USB wifi dongle in China at one point and it worked well too. I doubt that would have worked as well with drivers from 5 years ago.
Also, from what I understand, a used Ruckus Zoneflex 7982 off eBay ought to be able to handle just about any environment fairly well. Their proprietary beam forming hardware is special because it attenuates signals coming from other directions than that of the client. The only exception from what I have read is when other wifi equipment is right next to it (e.g. practically touching). Some review of it said that it failed to work until they moved other equipment away after consulting Ruckus. I cannot find a link to it though.
I placed an order with an eBay merchant that I expect to receive soon. $90 per used Zoneflex 7982 (that had a $1099 MSRP when new) is a bargain considering that these still provide some of the best wifi in the world. There are reports of these getting good throughout through multiple concrete walls:
A newer version of the midrange model in their product line (that has inferior radio specifications to the top end model) was able to give a cell phone decent throughput from 225 yards away when the (omnidirectional) AP was in doors:
As far as I know, the only better access points are the newer Ruckus models that replaced it. I am really excited to be getting one later this week. :)
If you meant to imply that I am somehow paid to say such things, I assure that I am not. I am a fairly well known OSS developer and such a thing would be damaging to my reputation. I just happen to be genuinely excited about this topic for the first time in years at this moment.
I just returned from visiting my grandmother in China, who is in the hospital. I stayed at the concrete and plaster apartment complex where my grandmother's apartment is. The horrible pentetration of wifi signals made me think plenty about wifi and that eventually lead me to discover that Ruckus's old equipment would work far better and is selling used on eBay at pricepoints seen in consumer grade gear. There really is not much benefit to Ruckus from the free advertisement of me talking about the used Ruckus equipment on eBay. They are not making any money off the used hardware market while the pricing for new Ruckus equipment is so high that it might as well not exist as far as the majority of people are concerned.
You managed to achieve good network performance by using your specialized skills.
Most people don't have the skills and aren't interested in learning them. This is the market for Apple's APs. The interesting description of what you did to get stuff working is close to meaningless to most people, and hence by contrast makes the trusted-brand easy-peasy gear look even more valuable.
I've wrestled with wireless gear since before 802.11 existed, including writing my own radio firmware, and I have an Airport at home which in practice means I don't need to do any of that awful stuff any more. In my lab we throw away about half the APs we buy due to mystery incompatibilities. Radio is still hard compared to most other things.
Point taken, although a minor counterpoint is that I do all that I can to share my knowledge whenever people ask. Last Sunday, I had advised a complete stranger on how to get cheaper cell phone service. We had started talking after I asked if it was alright if I joined his table at a crowded food court. Upon finding out that I am a software engineer, he started telling me about his problems and I did what I could to help him. It was a nice use of part of my Sunday. :)
Random thought: is there a reason we couldn't construct apartment buildings such that each tennant had a Faraday mesh embedded in their shared walls, but not in exterior-facing walls?
It would do strange things to cellular and broadcast radio, but it wouldn't destroy them, I think.
IANAP but I would think such a cage would cause WiFi to reflect internally, causing as much if not more trouble than noisy neighbors.
The "real" solution is for people in dense apartment buildings to just turn their damn Tx power down, but that's a prisoner's dilemma if I've ever seen one.
Actually WiFi was designed from the very beginning to do well despite reflections. My thesis advisor knew somebody who was applying ideas from "quantum chaos" to make WiFi robust to various environments at Bell Labs, back in the 1990s, before Carly Fiorina bankrupted Lucent.
It's a prisoner's dilemma in the case where everyone controls their own wireless APs, sure.
In the case where the building is served by one major ISP, and they provide combination gateway+APs, I could see the ISP deciding to "solve" the problem by turning the whole building into one AP mesh (with only one AP actually active per unit sphere) where each client gets a VLAN with tagged QoSing over the last-mile "backplane" back to their own gateway.
Though, if you're going that far, you may as well just call yourself a WiMAX provider and tell people their gateways are just extension picocells for the network, rather than end-user equipment. Which is basically what you get already from the ISPs that offer "public wi-fi for customers at our hotspots" (i.e. broadcast by all APs on our business plan), except that said wi-fi would be the only product, and would be served by residential gateways as well.
I actually tried to approach this problem in my own apartment complex. The effort died almost immediately. Very few consumer wireless access points even expose Tx power as a configuration parameter at all, even buried in an "Advanced Settings" section somewhere. You're lucky if they even expose channel selection at all.
So with the craptastic firemware of most consumer wifi APs, the AP hops on channels 1, 6 or 11, and stays there, screaming at full power. And the consumer, even if they know enough about radio to realize such is suboptimal, can't do anything about it without changing the firmware or buying a more expensive device.
In a really busy area, what's the issue there? If there are tons of people on 1/6/11, you may as well hop into the middle bits - there's already plenty of interference going on in the usual channels.
With 802.11g you're actually taking up four channels out of the available 12? So people hopping in the middle are messing with people on both sides of them. Sorry for the mobile link. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11g-2003
However, if the 'standard' channels are already congested, people are already messing with each other. Look at the semicircle graph on your link - someone on channel 4 is messing a fair bit with someone on channel 5, and a little bit on 6. However, someone on channel 6 is messing a lot with another person on 6.
So, people on the same channel silence each other (CTS/RTS), but on other channels it is simply seen as noise. If there are lots of people on 1/6/11, you're going to spend a lot of time silenced.
It's one of those things that you just have to try out in your own particular circumstances. Will you get better performance if frequently silenced, or better performance dealing with a high level of 'noise'?
IMO, cost is a big factor here. Adding things like insulation, EM sheilding, or anything else other than the minimum needed water water and electrical lines to the inside of walls raises the cost of construction. So if it isn't required by the function of the room or building code, you're unlikely to see such fanciness, unless it's some high-end luxury place where the shielding is a selling point. Expect higher rent in such a place to cover the additional costs of constructing those fancy EM-shielded units.
There is wifi blocking paint and wallpaper. http://www.lessemf.com/paint.html for example. That said, this may not be desirable if you have a cellphone without a local nanocell or voip switching.
There is wifi blocking paint and wallpaper. http://www.lessemf.com/paint.html for example. That said, this may not be desirable if you have a cellphone without a local nanocell or voip switching.
I live in London (my neighbours are a LOT closer than 1/4 mile) with a shitload of devices on my WiFi and I can still happily stream 4K TV while my my entire family uses iPads or laptops. Am I breaking the laws of physics?
No, you're just using subjective feelings rather than objective measurements. 4K doesn't specify a particular bit rate. If there is going to be a productive discussion, it needs to be acknowledged that there is a huge difference between streaming 1080p and Bluray 1080p.
No one would want to stream a Bluray. The point was to highlight that there are very different things that are still described by "1080p" and what is more important is the bit rate and codec rather than the common 4K, 1080p, 720p, or even "HD video" names.
I prefer wired connections as well, but surely you understand that many people want network connectivity in places in which they're not at liberty to physically modify the premises in order to run ethernet cable to their computer?
IMO, it's stupid to rewire your entire house to add connectivity for wired networking when WiFi is more than sufficient - and getting better and better. I have a Roku in my bedroom that works fantastically, I'm really not sure what I'd gain by ripping up walls/floorboards and installing a networking cable just because the TV doesn't move.
> or maybe i'll just nail a bunch of cables up around the corners of the ceiling, that'll be gorgeous
Who says it has to be ugly? Get creative and make some art out of it [1].
> it'll be great, it'll be real convenient to do all that again when i move
This strikes me as a bogus complaint; there's nothing convenient about moving, IMO. The inconvenience of it rises with the amount of stuff you have. If you already have devices that it makes sense to wire them up, the inconvenience of setting up and tearing down cable runs when moving is secondary to having to move that stuff in and out of an apartment to begin with.
In my experience a good rule of thumb is "will this need a lot of upload bandwidth?" Wireless devices running off of my AirPort Extreme typically can get 12-16 mbit download without breaking a sweat, the only real issue is upload speed is typically not nearly as fast or stable as download.
So, Apple TV? It's all download, so wifi is fine. XBox One? About half and half, so that gets a wire. Printer? All download and barely any bandwidth needed anyway, wifi. Desktop PC? Wired, of course.
I dunno where you're seeing this hostility to wired networks, the only hostility I've seen to them are from people who have legitimate reasons to not want to do it (or can't) i.e. renters, people who are not particularly handy, or people who don't have those high demand needs. For your average Joe running a phone, maybe a stream box and browsing Facebook on a laptop, a $40 wifi router will handle that just fine.
> If you really want high performance networking, use wired. It is stupid to connect a television set, for instance, via WiFi.
This is complete nonsense. 802.11N / 802.11AC are perfectly fine for your streaming needs. No need to try and rip up the walls or run ugly cables all over the place. Wireless in 2016 just works for streaming like this.
Unless you're trying to drive some 8K video but even then AC should still be good. I know over 802.11N, on an older generation of FireTV, separate by 1 story and multiple walls our TV streams fast and does native playback on the FireTV for most of our videos at its original quality settings.
Why do you think Apple's routers might be backdoor free but other companies' routers won't be? What makes Apple so special in this regard? I understand they challenged the government on the San Bernardino cell phone, but that's irrelevant as they also cooperate with the government like all other major companies. Is this idea simply based on some public statement or policy and if so why do you believe that given Apple's track record of cooperation that continues to this day?
> Apple's hardware/software integration has always been a better bet for ease of configuration, and honestly, reliability.
Meh. I worked at AppleCare for about 1.5 years and when I got calls regarding issues with the MacBooks I'd say 99% of the time the internet connectivity issues was with the AirPort Extreme and it had to be hard reset (I've had to walk through this process so much I could essentially recite it in my sleep back in the day).
That's only an anecdote but consumer grade networking, including Apple's, just always seems to suck. Nowadays I try to spend a little more and get some sort of small business type of router.
So, in my mind, their customers are not missing out on much. Though I'll admit the App for getting it up was nicely than browsing to some IP address like many routers at the time.
Totally agree -- these things seem to have major quality problems. Many years ago I spent $200 on an Apple router. It died completely in just over a year, literally a few weeks after the warranty period. It wouldn't even power on.
Granted, just an anecdote with a sample size of 1, but after that experience there's no way I would ever consider buying another Apple router. Especially since my previous router (a Linksys) was still chugging along after like 7 years.
Now Comcast and FiOS get those calls because they ship WiFi routers with their modems.
That's the real reason Apple is getting out of consumer WiFi routers: for most consumers it is an optional aftermarket accessory that makes things more complicated, not less.
Even my crappy DSL modem is a WiFi router. To attach my preferred router I had to login and set it to bridge mode. Why would Apple want to sell a product that requires people to do that?
> Now Comcast and FiOS get those calls because they ship WiFi routers with their modems.
The best part of working on fixing an internet issue was the second it looked like it could be an issue with the cable modem we had to get off the call. Even if it's likely turning it off and on would have worked. We were told to have the customer call their ISP and refuse to help with even any ideas let alone walking through something.
Which, I get, you don't want to be diagnosing some third party hardware. But I'd say about half the time when someone made it to me they have already called both Apple Care AND their ISP at least 1-2 times and they continue to blame each other.
I cant tell you how many times I've seen customers that were double NATed thru Airport (with the wifi turned on on both). Eg - Cable Router -> Airport -> Computer.
- Steer Apple towards its more established areas of expertise, where margins and competitive advantage is high, and the rest of the competition is dismal;
- Clip non-innovative departments where purpose and identity are lost;
- Concentrate resources where Apple's leadership is comfortable in;
I'm all in the Apple ecosystem, but I'm starting to feel pushed out. First the Mac Pro, then Displays, now this? Is Time Capsule next? My airport extreme is the most reliable home router I have ever owned.
Time Capsule really should be next. Apple doesn't have any real comparative advantage in backup software. The Time Capsule interface is interesting, but it's not what most people need from a backup solution (what most people need is set-it-and-forget-it that works from arbitrary locations).
On a related note, I've noticed that when running Zerotier (virtual LAN over the Internet, free and nifty) my MBP sees the two servers I'm using as Time Machine destinations whenever it's connected to the Internet and performs backups to them remotely.
Not necessarily a good thing when I'm tethering, but neat other times :P
I disagree with this. I think that Apple's time capsule is not well suited to an offsite backup solution, and it probably shouldn't even be the primary.
But if you're in the Apple ecosystem anyway, I think it's really convenient to take complete disk images for a full system restore. I think it's cool to use a 3-2-1 backup chain with a backup system image.
Granted, this is coming from someone who uses Tarsnap, Arq and Crashplan; but I've used Apple time capsules and I really admire their usability. In a restore scenario I don't have to choose particular files or folders, I just have to choose a date and the entire system is back. This is not without its downsides (no granularity in restore), but it's super convenient if it's what you need.
If I were in a decision making position, I'd get rid of the Apple routers like they are doing and double down on time capsules by providing an integrated offsite solution, perhaps marketed with end to end encryption as a nod to privacy advocates.
Huh? I've only ever used Time Machine to grab individual files from backup, which is dead easy. (Okay, I have grabbed all the most recent files when doing a full system restore.)
The competitive advantage is that it already works and requires barely any setup or input from me. It's been chugging along backing up all the macs in my home for years without issue. I do not want to be bothered setting up a new solution.
Completely wrong in my experience. Time Capsule was the only solution I could use with my less tech-savvy relatives to get them to actually back up their laptops. It is very much fire-and-forget.
I believe the Time Capsule is included in this decision. From the article "Apple currently sells three wireless routers, the AirPort Express, AirPort Extreme, and AirPort Time capsule."
In my experience, it's always been easy to set up. Actually using the Time Capsule, I've had one Time Capsule die, and one instance where I used a backup over 8 years. Retrieving the data from the backup was easy, without requiring a reference to a manual, IIRC.
We will know for sure by WWDC 2017 as the next macOS will have a brand new file system, which necessitate major rewrite of Time Machine backup software. I think Apple wants to kill Time Capsule but Time Machine is one major selling point of macOS. So likely we'll get Time Machine for iCloud or Apple partners with NAS vendor Synology etc to support Mac backup.
Maybe what they want the ecosystem to be is not what you're in. It seems to me they're focusing more and more on iOS, and maybe the OS X side of things is just a hurdle from that point of view. They did release new Macbooks, finally, but doesn't it kind of seem like they'd rather their customers just use iPhones and iPads?
> They did release new Macbooks, finally, but doesn't it kind of seem like they'd rather their customers just use iPhones and iPads?
That's true. Phil Schiller said the following in "The Inside Story of Apple’s New iMacs" [1]:
>> Schiller, in fact, has a grand philosophical theory of the Apple product line that puts all products on a continuum. Ideally, you should be using the smallest possible gadget to do as much as possible before going to the next largest gizmo in line.
>> “They are all computers,” he says. “Each one is offering computers something unique and each is made with a simple form that is pretty eternal. The job of the watch is to do more and more things on your wrist so that you don’t need to pick up your phone as often. The job of the phone is to do more and more things such that maybe you don’t need your iPad, and it should be always trying and striving to do that. The job of the iPad should be to be so powerful and capable that you never need a notebook. Like, Why do I need a notebook? I can add a keyboard! I can do all these things! The job of the notebook is to make it so you never need a desktop, right? It’s been doing this for a decade. So that leaves the poor desktop at the end of the line, What’s its job?”
That makes sense except their platforms dont even allow for that. For example, the iTunesConnect website has a ton of functionality that would be really useful to have on an iPad or iPhone becasue its nothing really difficult just basic app management stuff. Yet almost none of the functionality is available in the app.
Its bizarre, they have an app you can use on the smaller devices but actively limit the functionality it can have forcing me to use my macbook instead. I wish they would just allow their products to be as useful as they should be.
Another sad decision by Apple. My Airport Extreme and multiple Expresses worked great. Loved the Utility app to help configure them - handy little tool.
With Apple's resources the router division cannot have been a distraction, nor would not having it materially or even to any large extent, affect Apple's numbers. Maybe this reflects a retrenching mindset taking hold within Apple?
Until you need access to a feature that the latest version of the tool doesn't support, so you have to jump through hoops to find and download an old version and attempt to get it to run on a newer unsupported version of OS X. I see no good reason not to just provide a web interface which enables you to configure the router from any computer with a web browser.
I disagree. The Airport Utility was aggressively bad. Unless you had a setup that exactly matched their paint-by-numbers GUI, it presented a series of vague riddles to accomplish your task. What exactly were the UI metaphors it presented? 3 pretty pictures, right? What was with the hidden, right-click here, elements? A total fail, where a webapp would have been fine.
Well, it's not at all equivalent to an AP, Cloudkey and SG, but they DO have a consumer product: https://amplifi.com/
Unfortunately details are sparse on their incredibly annoying, scroll-hijacking marketing site. But it seems to be a simple enough, plug-and-play mesh network setup, and the industrial design is quite nice. I think Ubnt just doesn't have the marketing machine needed to really push it in the consumer space.
I bought an Amplifi with high expectations, and my expectations were exceeded. The router is great, but my favorite part is the included smartphone app. It makes diagnosing network problems, enabling guest networks, figuring out who's using all the bandwidth a cinch.
As I write this, I realize it sounds like an ad, so for clarity: I'm in no way affiliated with Ubiquiti - just a satisfied customer.
FWIW, I believe in the newer versions of the firmware and mobile apps, you can provision and configure the APs directly from your phone. The need for a controller was a major limitation in recommending the gear to other people, but the new iOS/Android apps can basically manage a small fleet of APs with nothing else than a few clicks in an app.
Of course, this requires a recent enough firmware version on the AP itself to support that feature, which, when I first tried it, I conveniently did not have, meaning I had to install the controller to upgrade everything anyway...
My lesson for that one is, uh, don't buy the older gear from resellers. Buy the new models from Unifi or Amazon directly.
I also highly recommend the ASUS routers. They cost more but if you need stronger signal these things are rock solid. I haven't had to restart it in over 3 years.
I setup one years ago with the Asus RT-N16 and haven't looked back since. Makes things like QoS a breeze. Yes, it's somewhat of a pain to setup, but once that's done you have a superb, reliable hardware+ software combination that will perform reliably for years. You can dig into more advanced customisations quite easily afterwards if you like, such as VPN client at the router level.
I think its harder and harder for Apple to charge $199 for a router when you can get a modem/router combo for $70, or "free" from comcast. The margins on these devices are declining fast. Additionally Google just released their router, and netgear/linksys etc have been dominating that market for ages.
Why allocate the manpower when the others on the market have caught up with ease of use and this generates less than 1% of your revenue?
I've never really liked AirPorts, but they were featurful. Honestly though, if Ubiquity would slap a Web UI on their stuff, they'd take-over the market.
I'm surprised Apple could never figure out a way to make a profitable wi-fi router. Every household needs one, so what prevented them from differentiating their products from generic routers? It really could have been a hugely profitable product.
I would have gone with a server approach to a wi-fi router, one that does everything in MacOS Server - email, VPN, web, etc..
I'm less bothered by an exit from routers than monitors and the other changes. That said they were nicely implemented and reliable.
All of the current changes are taking away.
Aesthetics were and are a huge part of the appeal of an Apple filled desk. Not a one of the other makes gets close yet Apple haven't even asked LG to make their 5k screen look nice or even complementary.
After the underwhelming MBP with rubbish travel-free keyboard, and not having a monitor to sit alongside my iMac, they seem incoherent. Where's the new Mini, Pro, 34" curved Cinema screen or iMac?
We just need someone else to discover aesthetics and they have a real problem to contend with. I care what the overall look is of things in my home.
Third-party routers have gotten a lot better in reliability since I got my first AirPort (when getting a consumer router that would do 100 MBit NAT routing was nearly impossible, and my parents had one of those lamp timers on their ADSL router to reboot it every day at 3 AM).
I felt this coming as long as Apple never added iOS backup support to the Time Capsule. The APFS migration seemed like it would be the final bullet.
Had to ditch my latest-model Time Capsule when I got fiber since Apple doesn't let you change the MTU (required for my PPPoE over fiber), and getting faster Time Machine backups than Apple's anemic CPU could muster was just a plus. I was hoping to reuse it as an 802.11ac bridge to my TV/Media center, but, nope, Apple removed wireless bridging as a feature a couple years ago.
Good riddance.
edit: just got reminded they spent a bunch of money developing special paper and ink for a $300 book instead of this. OK, yeah, no there's logic here.
APFS is my theory too. Given that Time Machine would need to be wholly re-written to support APFS, and the Apple strategy is to move everything to iCloud, this makes total sense.
I also expect that APFS will make superior alternatives to Time Machine from third-parties possible, so IMO in the long term this is a net plus. It is probably unfortunate for Apple that this news got out before Time Machine 2: iCloud Bugaloo could be announced, though.
Wow, so no more simple Time Machine backup product, and no more to stream music to (maybe they couldn't accept that they had a headphone jack?). This sounds like it's actually quite the departure from their previous strategy to have a digital hub with numerous features about the home.
I honestly think they have become myopic. They aren't seeing the big picture of what some of the less profitable products and features are accomplishing. They just aren't making enough income.
Hmm, pretty much any NAS out there (Synology, QNAP or WD) will expose itself as a TimeMachine target as soon as you turn it on. What's not simple about those (+ they give you actual protection from HDD failure)?
It used to be just one small neat white box, and now it becomes two less neat boxes: a router with pointy antennas and a NAS. More things to plug, more wires to run, more devices to setup.
Yeah I had a Linux TimeMachine for a time, I had to completely restart the TimeMachine pretty consistently. So I didn't much trust the NAS implementations of TimeMachine. But then again I have used TimeMachine through Mac OS Server and it started doing the same.
Netgear and Asus make good routers. Also last I checked I believe Netgear had the fastest wireless router on the market. Someone please correct me if I'm wrong!
Asus has semi-unified firmware for product line. It makes keeping things up to date easier. Quality went down hill on the RT-N66U (wireless instability), and rather than stick with older firmware that had more security holes than I could continue to track or try to fix it, I went with Ubiquiti equipment.
Ah, that's a shame. I have nothing but good things to say about mine, but if issues like that happens in the future I'll likely move to merlin/tomato/some wrt (if the hardware is still viable).
"sharpen the company’s focus on consumer products that generate the bulk of its revenue"
I'm sure Apple of all companies knows this, but revenue of a particular product doesn't necessarily show the whole picture when some of your brand's appeal is that customers can buy all Apple products and be fairly confident they work well together.
Separately, I'm very happy with Ubiquiti products, but I'm also a power user.
if you think about it - they've abandoned monitors, routers, Mac minis, MacBook airs, iPods, what the hell are all those people who worked on these products are doing now? I can understand if they had some other great products in the works but Mac Pro has not been updated for a while, iPhone and MacBook updates are pathetic, looks like Apple is now focused more on marketing and social buzz than creating actual products...
Interesting to see all the love for AirPorts here. In my experience, they've been pretty garbage, and it was a great relief when we finally ditched them and bought some TP-Link equipment instead, and now we have far less trouble with the office wifi.
This restriction of their efforts on only the most profitable offerings like this seems like a continued step backwards for a company which used to do so much innovating. If all you work on is the iteration and merging of existing devices, you're going to be left in the cold as you're out-innovated by your competitors.
This is what happened to Microsoft, and it took many years and a major internal upset to get them back on a positive track. And now look at Microsoft since they've started diversifying and innovating again: they are providing an OS (and hardware) which is genuinely interesting to professionals in a variety of fields. They are going to steal Apple's thunder here soon, unless Apple really makes an effort.
A commercial Linux distro aimed at consumers would be cool, but things aren't so bad as it is. Making the switch will surely require some adaptation and getting used to, but when you get settled, things are pretty smooth, and only getting better. I've been happily running Debian as my primary OS for 8 years now, and I spent a few of those years running Linux exclusively.
The way I see it, Apple excels on the whole overarching synergy thing, while Linux excels on individual component quality. Considering that each component is an independent project, the Linux ecosystem will never be as homogenous as Windows or Mac. That said, it's a trade many of us happily make for the power of choice.
For Airplay, I replaced my Airport Express w/ a RaspberryPi running Shairport a few years ago. Works much better, perhaps because the Pi is on wired ethernet, for one less streaming signal over the wireless (?).
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 376 ms ] thread1) ecosystem. the more co-operating products you have, the more likely you are to keep people in your ecosystem. There's been quite a few posts here about people who are/were "all apple". That only works when Apple produce a wide enough range of products. As they shrink, there's a greater risk of more people going to other ecosystems.
2) "all your eggs in one basket". Obviously Apple are focusing on iOS devices and rightly so they're massively profitable. However focusing in one place leaves you at risk if that product line declines and you can't diversify fast enough. Tech. history is littered with examples of this like Blackberry.
AirPorts worked really nicely when consumer Wifi stations were rather hit-and-miss than foolproof (anecdotally).
Now wireless stations are bundled with all sorts of broadband service accounts, and given Apple's market share, are probably pretty much expected to "just work" with their hardware.
Aren't wireless routers now just a commodity that incorporates very little chances to add actually value adding features?
All of the changes - decaying Mac Pro, mediocre gimmicky MBP, end of this, end of that, confusion over Titan, Watch, which no one cares about - all suggest that Apple has lost the concept of brand and product synergy.
It looks trivial but it's actually fatal, because it undermines the perception that when you buy Apple you're buying Special.
Now you're just buying. And when a company is selling overpriced commodity hardware, it absolutely needs to convince its customers that it's offering more than that.
Killing off accessories is fine. But if they're not focusing on that anymore, and no new Macs in ages, what the hell ARE they focusing on?
P.S.: I realize this comment may not be in line with HN etiquette
Nothing Apple has done lately is really innovative. Their value is taking something the "commodity" manufacturers already do, and doing it right (for more money). That's precisely where the Airport Express sat. Pay a little more, never have to worry about it.
Same with phones, same with computers, same with tablets.
If they ever release a new Mac Mini, it will probably be their last.
Sad day for me.
I don't understand how a router can be simpler then just typing in the password unless your trying to accomplish something more complex.
thank you for the recommendations. That was really my next question! Thumbs(votes) up!
If Apple is indeed abandoning the router space I'm a bit disappointed and worried that leadership doesn't understand the basic needs of their average brand loyal customers.
http://www.apple.com/shop/product/ME182LL/A/airport-time-cap...
I can imagine that they would want people to migrate to iCloud. That would be less helpful for those that don't have a (reliable) internet connection.
Just try to imagine Steve Jobs setting up a generic router.
* * *
Now imagine him searching for a wireless router and seeing some Google product in the top rankings.
(EDIT: I tried to play with the "Steve wouldn't allow this" trope and failed — removing it to reduce the noise)
- Steve Jobs
Can we please not bring this up. What makes you think you know anything about what Steve Jobs would have liked?
Wifi though has always been a very big PITA for consumers, and Apple's hardware/software integration has always been a better bet for ease of configuration, and honestly, reliability.
The optimist in me hopes that maybe they'll have something better for us, or are making an acquisition to replace their current product lineup completely.
The pessimist in me thinks that maybe they're leaving this market to avoid needing to develop hardware that meets its publicly stated standards for protecting consumer privacy. Potentially they have been approached/mandated to enable some kind of backdoor in it, and they chose to stop producing it, rather than comply. /tinfoil_hat
I did enjoy using Apple's wireless routers, though.
But I do concur - I will miss the ease of the Airport tech (not so much the most recent prices though).
Also: don't most people get their wireless service from their cable router now?
I don't think Apple has a comparative advantage in providing wireless routers. That's not to say that there's no advantage to be found in producing excellent wireless routers: there are companies trying to do this today, but Apple isn't one of them.
I'm a network engineer and use pretty much "enterprise" gear across the board at home. A couple of years ago, though, I yanked out my Cisco ASA firewall (connecting my home network to my ISP) and replaced it. I'm now using a (expensive) "RouterMaxx 1106" [0] (PDF) as my home router. It was designed for and shipped with Mikrotik RouterOS but I replaced that with pfSense, initially, and then switched, later, to OpenBSD. It Just Works(TM).
The hardware, for the most part, doesn't matter too much. The software you choose is much more important, in my opinion. Choose something that can be tuned and locked down as needed and, critically, gets updated regularly. I'm a "CLI guy" and quite comfortable with OpenBSD and a terminal so this setup works for me. For those desiring a point-and-click web-based method of administration, pfSense, OpenWRT, and similar may better serve their needs.
n.b.: FWIW, my router doesn't provide Wi-Fi, only (6 x 1000 Mbit) wired Ethernet. I have been using an Aerohive AP330 access point but am currently replacing it with a Ubiquiti Unifi AP AC PRO.
[0]: http://www.balticnetworks.com/docs/routermaxx%206%20port.pdf (PDF)
I think this is the key part: thinking about my friends and family, over the last few years everyone has switched to using the box which came from their ISP except for a few IT people and gamers.
This is generally a good thing since the ISPs are significantly more likely to install security updates, and WiFi speeds exceeded the average home internet connection somewhere around a decade ago so the benefits to buying your own are fairly limited for most people.
Depends where you live. There are ISPs that will get you 250 Mbit downstream via FTTH, but their WiFi supports only 802.11n over 2.4 GHz only. When your neighbors get similar setup, you will not get over WiFi anything that approaches your Internet speed.
People think they need repeaters, cable installation, all kind of expensive and worrying projects... nope, just use a real wireless router instead of the Comcast box.
Yes they do, but they shouldn't.
The problem is that you place your all-in-one cable-modem-router-AP at the point where the cable enters your house. This is unlikely to be the ideal position to place an access point.
For example, my fiber connection enters my home at one of the corners of the house. You want your AP in a central location.
Are you thinking of other issues besides signal strength?
Apple is nudging consumer behaviour with each product transition - I wouldn't be entirely surprised if we start seeing more devices with mobile data built in (say, with an antenna behind the logo or behind the Touch Bar).
There is no need for Apple to be in this market, there is no problem to be solved for 99.9% of people.
Time Warner charges $10/month for theirs, and they're awful.
Experience tells me this is not actually the case. Provider-provided routers are a major PITA if you want them secure and stable.
I also had a router from another UK ISP that would crash and hang if you sent it a malformed IP packet (ie put its respond-to address as itself); it'd go mental replying to itself and then processing the messages it sent to itself. Not quality.
The EE broadband router I had would hand off its internal web admin session to external visitors if they connected whilst a web admin session was in progress. Yes, let's hand our internal web admin session page to an external visitor....
BT sent another hub that looked identical and worked correctly; underneath it was a Siemens instead of a Thompson I think.
So all in all, I have found that the ISP boxes were never really finished, and some (like Sky's box) needed rebooting periodically as I recall, so buggy too.
to be fair, I've got $1000 cisco hardware that can't wrap the external IP like that...
Usually, you don't even want to remove the PoS router you get from your ISP from it's box. In my experience no ISP ever gives away decent equipment, it's just the cheapest thing they could order in quantity.
Another issue with an ISP-issued router is that you have no idea what they did and can do with it. I know of several ISP's that have full remote access to the routers they hand out. Basically, you risk exposing your entire home network.
There are have been some guides to try to bypass the router and go strait to the OTN but it is extremely non trivial.
I hear it's a challenge to avoid the standard Verizon router if you also have TV or phone service through Fios.
I also confirmed this a while back on some forums but perhaps they have changed this. It is good to hear you had success. Do you have a residential or biz plan?
Edit:
Here is the link (I was mistaken and thought it was on a forum): http://theassociatespress.com/bypass-fios-router-entirely/
Like I said before it is pretty non trivial and you have to plead your case to them to let it happen.
My own household used its own router with the Verizon router configured as a MoCA bridge almost exclusively from 2006 until 2015 when we cancelled FiOS TV in favor of an OTA TV antenna. There were a few brief periods of time where I tried having Verizon's router be the gateway router, but it turned out to be awful.
Expect to hear the CSR make vague references to advanced features being absent when saying that you want to use your own router over their advice to rent theirs. The only "advanced feature" that would be absent is Verizon's remote management backdoor.
Of course there is a need. Apple has always been one of the first to use new WiFi standards, the Airports made these transfer speeds non-theoretical. My three year-old Airport still beats my 2016 cable modem royally on 802.11 AC. And this is not one of those cheapo cable modems (basically the latest and greatest Fritz!Box).
A large chunk of Apple users that I know have an Airport or Time Capsule for these and other reasons.
There is no need for Apple to be in this market, there is no problem to be solved for 99.9% of people.
Hopefully, in the near future we can have this done with libre hardware. Cheap POWER stuff would be great.
[1] http://www.fit-pc.com/web/products/fitlet/
$200 is reasonable, compared to all the time I've spent farting with other brands of WiFi routers, including whatever piece of crap my ISP sent me. Now what's the no-brainer WiFi router choice? ASUS something, Ubiquity (sp?)? Read some reviews, order what seems the best, marvel at the weird new mutant feature set... Oops, that's another afternoon wasted.
Oh darn, my offbrand WiFi router had another security exploit, 6 months ago, and I just found out. And so forth.
Hopefully the silver lining is Apple is anticipating metro WiFi (WiMax?), though I wish they were helping drive that transition. Like I had hoped Google was... Oh well.
Ubiquity. Or in general: stay away from consumer-grade network equipment.
Airport is amazing for consistent throughput and reliability.
Consumer-grade routers usually are faster. What they are not is more reliable, or easy to use/manage.
Ars Technica's article basically says good riddance, but if you go back to their original review observed that the AirPort Extreme crushes all competing routers on both ease of use and performance.
I may look into the new google APs, so I can get the latest wireless speeds across the house.
The speed and coverage is also fantastic from my experience.
Option 1: look and see what all the DDWRT/tomato/etc... guys are suggesting. Chances are the hardware is decent, and you know it will have support for the good 3rd party firmwares if you ever want to try it.
Option 2: Abandon all consumer grade gear. Just get Ubiquity stuff.
Option 3: Google just released their routers (like last week), which support automatic mesh networking when you use multiple. Way too early to make a call, but its something to keep an eye on.
If you don't trust your ISP provided firewall/router then you probably have bigger problems. Both big ISPs in my area offer to turn the router into a bridge-mode device I can plug into a box running pfsense if I desire it, but frankly, that sounds like a PITA. Their routers work well enough. I think going forward we will just buy access point, not routers. The router problem has been solved for a long time.
>Abandon all consumer grade gear. Just get Ubiquity stuff.
I'd argue Ubiquity is really consumer stuff, just small business friendly. Their performance, price, stability, etc isn't that much better than a Netgear in access point mode. They just have a java-based controller which is handy for managing multiple AP's. Inside, they're kinda crappy.
>Google just released their routers (like last week), which support automatic mesh networking when you use multiple.
Google wifi is actually a latecomer. You can get residential friendlier Ubiquity-style solutions via Orbi or Eero, which is what Google is copying here. I believe Google's 3-pack beats both on price currently.
edit: modems and routers are completely different cases/devices and performance/stability are different than money saving. Regardless, my ISP doesn't charge me for my modem, so there's no incentive for me to buy my own.
As for Ubiquiti being consumer grade, it is like an Intel Xeon E3. It is the same chip that is used in consumer stuff with enhancements for reliability. For instance, Ubiquiti equipment supports grounding via STP Ethernet. It generally supports some variant of PoE and is meant to be mounted on walls and ceilings. There are even outdoor models. It also does not require a reboot on every change. In addition, there is a team of engineers working on making the firmware better and their customers are able to report problems to them. Then there are firmware features like VLANs, policy based routing, BGP, ping watch dogs and other things not found in stock firmware of consumer grade equipment.
Comcast does this as well - if you are leasing the Comcast modem then you are putting out a pair of APs. One of them is a public Comcast hotspot. I think you can request that it be turned off however.
Right now I have a Cisco DPC3008, which I can't really complain about. I have a Buffalo Airstation Extreme 1900, which has been good so far apart from its minute-long reboot times. I thought I was getting a DD-WRT router though, didn't realize the standard version did not have a supported DD-WRT build.
I have to admit though - when a contractor ripped out the sidewalks and took out my cable, I was glad that my neighbors were running the hotspot. Took almost 3 weeks to get back online.
In Germany, Kabel Deutschland can and does regularly update your cable modem remotely. There's a even a list of "censored websites" pushed down to your own router. They provide a Fritzbox but it's slightly more locked down (feature-wise) than normal so you can't even use it to a full potential.
I bought an Airport and stuck it behind it to at least isolate our home network from this backdoored mess. Good to know that Ubiquity provide a reasonable replacement.
Bought my own modem + router and saw my speeds go from ~40mbs to 120+mbs. Upload speed also saw a similar scale increase.
Asus was really nice for a while, one of the more open mfg's, my AC3200 unfortunately came out after the lockdown, and is unsupported... would love to get back to tomato-usb or similar.
I have owned three consumer routers the last three years, all of which required a reboot every few days in order to stay responsive. My problem with consumer routers isn't speed, easy of setup or need for mesh networking, but reliability.
I currently have a rock-solid Mikrotik hAP ac lite [1], which has not been rebooted once since I installed it in February. However, it only has an internal antenna, and devices in another room are constantly dropping out, so I'm considering something else, if I can retain the reliability.
[1] https://routerboard.com/RB952Ui-5ac2nD
People won't listen though because in 2016 it seems most people think wires are ritually unclean.
It is a given that wired is a better option, but I cannot imagine any modern SOHO environment without a wireless router/access point.
Mesh networks are just going from the frying pan to the fire.
I am not saying that people "don't need wireless" but that if having a reliable WiFi network matters to you, the best way to speed up your WiFi network is to move anything that you can possible move to wired to free up bandwidth for WiFi.
That includes turning off the rouge access points that are created by printers, game consoles, phones, etc.
... they don't particularly want to lift floorboards, and drill through floors and ceilings if the wireless solution is 'good enough'.
This is also shitty news because I had very high confidence that an Apple router would not ship with any kind of malware or other crap I don't need. Now, I have to find something better, comparable in price, and works well with Mac household.. Sad face.
That being said, the Apple APs are the fastest consumer-grade APs out there. If you are going to hit the theoretical maximum, an Apple AP is your best bet. I don't think streaming is where people notice issues with their internet though. In my experience people tend to notice issues in video games, skype, facetime, and other applications where there isn't a buffer to hide issues with dropped packets first.
I max out my cable modem's connection. I pay for 50mb/s, and 802.11n on a 5Ghz channel is more than sufficient.
At work however, yes, that gigabit wired ethernet connection is really nice. :)
However, I get ~950 mbps over the wire (on a 1 gbps connection), so I still plug in when I'm sitting at my desk and need to transmit large files.
Apart from Apple's and Google's idiotic antics, what routers require anything more than a browser to configure?
Good luck configuring that with a mac....
As annoying as it is for some, the configuration interface for Apple AirPort used a simple SNMP interface. Now, lots of SNMP software has had bugs and remote exploits, but all things being equal it's a much simpler interface to export and requires shipping less code, not least because it doesn't have to support a GUI, directly or indirectly.
That said, I always configure my WiFi router (AirPort or w'ever) in bridging mode and put them behind my gateway. And I try to disable any web GUI entirely if at all possible. People who use the built-in WiFi capabilities of their Cable or DSL modems are begging to be hacked.
Not really, CGI can be written in anything, shell scripting, C, whatever. But security-wise, it doesn't much matter the language because the programmers working on the web interfaces of such embedded devices rarely do a good job.
Considering the amount of crappy C most routers have, that's probably the least of your concerns.
One of the big things that people don't realize is that bandwidth of wireless is split between every device on that channel. So if you are streaming to your TV/roku/xbox/etc over wifi, you are killing the bandwidth for your laptop and phone as well. Plus, if you live in a city your wireless bandwidth is pretty much guaranteed to suck because every ISP includes wifi with their modems, destroying the noise floor. Comcast modems are a particularly notable example, as they have a "public" 2.4 ghz network in addition to the "private" 2.5 and 5 ghz networks. There are no fewer than 30 wifi networks available inside my house when I check on my phone, and I live in a row house with metal lathe under the plaster, which greatly attenuates wifi signals.
I think the biggest barrier to wiring things is that patch cables are incredibly expensive if you buy them at Best Buy, etc. Most non-technical people I know only own the patch cable that came with their modem. Once I get them wired up, they are astounded by how much faster their internet is. They don't have buffering issues, the internet doesn't drop randomly, and it just seems "faster" (which I attribute to lower latency). I toss extra patch cables in my Monoprice orders now and sell them to my friends at-cost. To be honest, it's partially for my own sanity as well, because watching Netflix at 480p on a 50/15 connection drives me nuts.
Yes. Same here. Ethernet is an oddly underrated technology. And Monoprice is one of these things that nerds know about and no one else does. There may be other companies like that—someone above mentioned an enterprise router company that sells better stuff than most consumer companies. Yet I've already forgotten its name.
Ubiquiti also makes a great series of wireless APs that are worth checking out.
My network right now is a Edgerouter lite, 2 Unifi AP AC Lites, and a used Dell 2816 managed switch.
This is like an engineer not knowing the mains voltage is 230V, or a baker not knowing about standard grades of flour.
I had no idea that WiFi was that much better than Ethernet!
( this is why units matter, kids ;)
Apparently I was grossly wrong, and I still don't understand why I was wrong and why the changes made such a large difference. Something to do with network protocols and response to packet loss or something, I guess.
I'm always posting latency numbers every programmer should know: https://gist.github.com/jboner/2841832
Don't do that. Instead get a ethernet powerline adapter:
https://www.cnet.com/topics/networking/best-networking-devic...
http://www.command.com/3M/en_US/command/products/~/Command-C...
http://www.command.com/3M/en_US/command/products/?N=5924736+...
However most apartments let you 'hang pictures'; anything that leaves so small of a hole that painting over it effectively patches it.
In my apartment, the biggest issue I face is interference from other wireless routers. Because of this, the powerline performance is about 40% faster on my desktop (right above the router one floor) and much more consistent. It also does help with wireless congestion, and really helps with using my desktop as a PLEX server. Before, higher bitrates would cause serious issues, and now it just works.
I'm not sure if the tech has matured recently or I just had a good use-case for it, but it's miles better than WiFi. I'm using TP-Link's product.
For testing, I plugged them into AC outlets along the same wall in the same room, with ~14 feet separating them. After getting them linked up (very simple), I connected laptops to each unit, manually assigned IP addresses to the laptops, and used iPerf [1] to run throughput tests.
I'll spare you my rant about them but peak speeds were extremely disappointing, just shy of 50 Mbps. I honestly didn't expect anywhere near the advertised 1200 Mbps but I was expecting speeds relatively close to what I can get over my existing wireless. 50 Mbps may be quite acceptable to some, especially if one's Internet connection isn't that fast, but it was far from acceptable for me. They would also randomly "freeze" or "pause" for 20-30 seconds at a time but I didn't really investigate that issue.
[0]: https://www.netgear.com/home/products/networking/powerline/P...
[1]: https://iperf.fr
Also the idea of willingly putting noise in the electrical grid seems sketchy to me. I used to live in a house where I could not get good noise-free audio because the line was not a pure sine wave and most consumer PSUs were crappy to let noise through.
I keep what devices I can on wired, but it's really not feasible for everyone or for all devices. I sometimes have to switch my phone over to LTE because the wireless sucks too much. There's obviously no ethernet port on that.
http://cloud.harryh.com/3c0t293h3Z3q
Lots of people are complaining about their WiFi and many are discovering that a $200 consumer router doesn't help. What does work is to accept the physics, get a wired router and a $80 ubiquiti access point and run a wire so the access point is in the center of your house.
Let's put it this way: the inverse square law means that if you put the router at the edge of your house, relative to the center, you are going to have a minimum signal strength dropped by a factor of 4; this is on top of any attenuation that you get from going through multiple walls.
Accept the laws of physics or you'll find that no amount of spending on your access point will make your system completely reliable for a wide range of devices.
This is why all attempts to sell differentiated WiFi routers have failed -- the one way you can differentiate yourself in terms of reliablity, never mind performance, is to site your access point correctly.
Everybody thinks the mesh network fairy will save them, but there is a name for mesh networks, and it is "radio interference".
Can I push 1 Gbps from my phone to my other phone? No... but I don't need to. My TVs and other devices work just fine too (none of them need more than 10Mbps to be usable, even with stable HD streaming).
The few things that do need bandwidth are on a wired connection giving them a hefty 1 Gbps that isn't interfered with by anything.
Maybe you have just had terrible routers?
Also, my phone company refuses to upgrade so I am on high-latency DSL. When a packet gets dropped in my local network, it takes a long time to get a replacement from internet based services.
You don't need high bandwidth to use the internet reliably, but you do need low packet loss, and the effects of packet loss and high latency multiply with each other -- local packet loss is much more painful if your internet is slow than if it is fast. Thus having a reliable local network helps experienced performance, even if you have a 2Mbps internet connection.
There may be a unit conversion problem here, but an apartment as small as 500Sqft apartment would be exceedingly rare - that's ~46.5Sq/m.
Many cities don't even allow apartments that small...
Studios are usually around 400 sq ft.
I suspect that your biggest problem is really just your terrible ISP. I've had that problem before too, but my current one is great (and local).
I serve my 1200 sq ft condo with a single node, and it gets good coverage throughout the space, including the front/back patios.
My parent's 2400 sq ft house took 2 nodes in the attic + one in the back of the garage to cover the back yard.
They can hit their ISP's 150mbit/second cap from anywhere in the house or yard.
They use tablets almost exclusively and though dad still uses a laptop from time to time, he has no desire to plug it into ethernet, so a wired network wouldn't really be useful for them.
If I crunched the numbers correctly, roughly 2.5% of the US population lives in NYC alone. If you add in Boston, DC, San Francisco and other expensive cities I'd bet you can break 10% of the population in the core expensive cities alone.
80% of Americans live in an urban area.
With wood floors you can usually avoid much impact and just run cables under the floorboards.
What's wrong with expecting WIFI to work well enough to enjoy low latency high definition/4k content?
You can totally do that in rural areas. I'm talking at least 1/4 mile separation between houses.
If you're not in that kind of area and you still expect it, it's because you don't understand the physics. I don't mean that as an insult, just a statement of fact. I went to school for electrical engineering and that statement you made above is laughable for anyone who knows the trade. To me, a similar statement might be "Why can't I have a car that makes 1000 HP, gets 100 MPG and costs $10k?" Yes someday that might be a reality but with the tech we have now, it's definitely not.
Bandwidth over the air is fixed and it's split between everyone who is within "earshot" and similar to how it eventually gets impossible to hear anyone at a party once the room is packed and everyone is talking, so it goes with wireless. There's just not enough spectrum to go around. That's why people use wires; every wire has (roughly) a whole spectrum all to itself. Pull 100 wires? Get 100x bandwidth. Put up 100 wireless transmitters? Get 1/100 the bandwidth on each one. The math there heavily, heavily favors wires. Ethernet, coax, fiber, whatever. If you make a new signal propagation domain you can use as much of it as it'll allow you. If you use the big signal propagation domain that everyone has access to, prepare to share.
Also, I have gotten wifi working well in non-rural areas using Ubiquiti Unifi AC Lite APs. In suburban New York, a couple of them blanket my home. In my grandmother's Shanghai apartment in a building that is a mix of concrete and plaster, just 1 is sufficient (although for a much smaller volume), despite dozens of nearby APs. Admittedly, I moved to 5GHz there because I was literally the only one using it, but 2.4GHz had worked fine when I tried it. Peak throughout is higher on 5GHz due to higher channel widths though.
OK, now take your dog to a place full of dogs and other dog whistles. See how well it works.
Once the spectrum gets noisy, interference happens. Just because you found a quiet spot in the spectrum doesn't mean that spectrum sharing isn't a physical reality anymore. It just means you found some to keep all to yourself! Until someone else starts using 5GHz too.
In fairness, I had made tweaks to iwlwifi's kernel module options in order to have usable wifi on my laptop. Until a year ago, I was accustomed to have a hellish experience in congested areas until I turned off Bluetooth coexistence support in the iwlwifi driver. That feature would almost always cause severe packet loss on my T520 in crowded environments even when there did not appear to be any Bluetooth traffic.
Anyway, it is possible to get wifi working well for certain workloads in crowded environments. Making it work well in general might require better drivers and better equipment than one might have at first though. For example, I understand that ath9k was a disaster when it was first made, but it is fairly decent now. I ran an AP off an ath9k USB wifi dongle in China at one point and it worked well too. I doubt that would have worked as well with drivers from 5 years ago.
Also, from what I understand, a used Ruckus Zoneflex 7982 off eBay ought to be able to handle just about any environment fairly well. Their proprietary beam forming hardware is special because it attenuates signals coming from other directions than that of the client. The only exception from what I have read is when other wifi equipment is right next to it (e.g. practically touching). Some review of it said that it failed to work until they moved other equipment away after consulting Ruckus. I cannot find a link to it though.
I placed an order with an eBay merchant that I expect to receive soon. $90 per used Zoneflex 7982 (that had a $1099 MSRP when new) is a bargain considering that these still provide some of the best wifi in the world. There are reports of these getting good throughout through multiple concrete walls:
http://www.cio.com/article/2388827/wireless-networking/revie...
A newer version of the midrange model in their product line (that has inferior radio specifications to the top end model) was able to give a cell phone decent throughput from 225 yards away when the (omnidirectional) AP was in doors:
http://www.evdoinfo.com/content/view/5077/64/
As far as I know, the only better access points are the newer Ruckus models that replaced it. I am really excited to be getting one later this week. :)
If you meant to imply that I am somehow paid to say such things, I assure that I am not. I am a fairly well known OSS developer and such a thing would be damaging to my reputation. I just happen to be genuinely excited about this topic for the first time in years at this moment.
I just returned from visiting my grandmother in China, who is in the hospital. I stayed at the concrete and plaster apartment complex where my grandmother's apartment is. The horrible pentetration of wifi signals made me think plenty about wifi and that eventually lead me to discover that Ruckus's old equipment would work far better and is selling used on eBay at pricepoints seen in consumer grade gear. There really is not much benefit to Ruckus from the free advertisement of me talking about the used Ruckus equipment on eBay. They are not making any money off the used hardware market while the pricing for new Ruckus equipment is so high that it might as well not exist as far as the majority of people are concerned.
You managed to achieve good network performance by using your specialized skills.
Most people don't have the skills and aren't interested in learning them. This is the market for Apple's APs. The interesting description of what you did to get stuff working is close to meaningless to most people, and hence by contrast makes the trusted-brand easy-peasy gear look even more valuable.
I've wrestled with wireless gear since before 802.11 existed, including writing my own radio firmware, and I have an Airport at home which in practice means I don't need to do any of that awful stuff any more. In my lab we throw away about half the APs we buy due to mystery incompatibilities. Radio is still hard compared to most other things.
It would do strange things to cellular and broadcast radio, but it wouldn't destroy them, I think.
The "real" solution is for people in dense apartment buildings to just turn their damn Tx power down, but that's a prisoner's dilemma if I've ever seen one.
In the case where the building is served by one major ISP, and they provide combination gateway+APs, I could see the ISP deciding to "solve" the problem by turning the whole building into one AP mesh (with only one AP actually active per unit sphere) where each client gets a VLAN with tagged QoSing over the last-mile "backplane" back to their own gateway.
Though, if you're going that far, you may as well just call yourself a WiMAX provider and tell people their gateways are just extension picocells for the network, rather than end-user equipment. Which is basically what you get already from the ISPs that offer "public wi-fi for customers at our hotspots" (i.e. broadcast by all APs on our business plan), except that said wi-fi would be the only product, and would be served by residential gateways as well.
So with the craptastic firemware of most consumer wifi APs, the AP hops on channels 1, 6 or 11, and stays there, screaming at full power. And the consumer, even if they know enough about radio to realize such is suboptimal, can't do anything about it without changing the firmware or buying a more expensive device.
So, people on the same channel silence each other (CTS/RTS), but on other channels it is simply seen as noise. If there are lots of people on 1/6/11, you're going to spend a lot of time silenced.
It's one of those things that you just have to try out in your own particular circumstances. Will you get better performance if frequently silenced, or better performance dealing with a high level of 'noise'?
No, you're just using subjective feelings rather than objective measurements. 4K doesn't specify a particular bit rate. If there is going to be a productive discussion, it needs to be acknowledged that there is a huge difference between streaming 1080p and Bluray 1080p.
or maybe i'll just nail a bunch of cables up around the corners of the ceiling, that'll be gorgeous
it'll be great, it'll be real convenient to do all that again when i move
Who says it has to be ugly? Get creative and make some art out of it [1].
> it'll be great, it'll be real convenient to do all that again when i move
This strikes me as a bogus complaint; there's nothing convenient about moving, IMO. The inconvenience of it rises with the amount of stuff you have. If you already have devices that it makes sense to wire them up, the inconvenience of setting up and tearing down cable runs when moving is secondary to having to move that stuff in and out of an apartment to begin with.
1. http://imgur.com/Zn4VKyK
So, Apple TV? It's all download, so wifi is fine. XBox One? About half and half, so that gets a wire. Printer? All download and barely any bandwidth needed anyway, wifi. Desktop PC? Wired, of course.
I dunno where you're seeing this hostility to wired networks, the only hostility I've seen to them are from people who have legitimate reasons to not want to do it (or can't) i.e. renters, people who are not particularly handy, or people who don't have those high demand needs. For your average Joe running a phone, maybe a stream box and browsing Facebook on a laptop, a $40 wifi router will handle that just fine.
This is complete nonsense. 802.11N / 802.11AC are perfectly fine for your streaming needs. No need to try and rip up the walls or run ugly cables all over the place. Wireless in 2016 just works for streaming like this.
Unless you're trying to drive some 8K video but even then AC should still be good. I know over 802.11N, on an older generation of FireTV, separate by 1 story and multiple walls our TV streams fast and does native playback on the FireTV for most of our videos at its original quality settings.
I mean really, this is the kind of thing you can/should be able to log into from a web page, why does this all have to be locked behind an app?
Meh. I worked at AppleCare for about 1.5 years and when I got calls regarding issues with the MacBooks I'd say 99% of the time the internet connectivity issues was with the AirPort Extreme and it had to be hard reset (I've had to walk through this process so much I could essentially recite it in my sleep back in the day).
That's only an anecdote but consumer grade networking, including Apple's, just always seems to suck. Nowadays I try to spend a little more and get some sort of small business type of router.
So, in my mind, their customers are not missing out on much. Though I'll admit the App for getting it up was nicely than browsing to some IP address like many routers at the time.
Granted, just an anecdote with a sample size of 1, but after that experience there's no way I would ever consider buying another Apple router. Especially since my previous router (a Linksys) was still chugging along after like 7 years.
That's the real reason Apple is getting out of consumer WiFi routers: for most consumers it is an optional aftermarket accessory that makes things more complicated, not less.
Even my crappy DSL modem is a WiFi router. To attach my preferred router I had to login and set it to bridge mode. Why would Apple want to sell a product that requires people to do that?
The best part of working on fixing an internet issue was the second it looked like it could be an issue with the cable modem we had to get off the call. Even if it's likely turning it off and on would have worked. We were told to have the customer call their ISP and refuse to help with even any ideas let alone walking through something.
Which, I get, you don't want to be diagnosing some third party hardware. But I'd say about half the time when someone made it to me they have already called both Apple Care AND their ISP at least 1-2 times and they continue to blame each other.
- Steer Apple towards its more established areas of expertise, where margins and competitive advantage is high, and the rest of the competition is dismal;
- Clip non-innovative departments where purpose and identity are lost;
- Concentrate resources where Apple's leadership is comfortable in;
- Sunset all else.
Not necessarily a good thing when I'm tethering, but neat other times :P
But if you're in the Apple ecosystem anyway, I think it's really convenient to take complete disk images for a full system restore. I think it's cool to use a 3-2-1 backup chain with a backup system image.
Granted, this is coming from someone who uses Tarsnap, Arq and Crashplan; but I've used Apple time capsules and I really admire their usability. In a restore scenario I don't have to choose particular files or folders, I just have to choose a date and the entire system is back. This is not without its downsides (no granularity in restore), but it's super convenient if it's what you need.
If I were in a decision making position, I'd get rid of the Apple routers like they are doing and double down on time capsules by providing an integrated offsite solution, perhaps marketed with end to end encryption as a nod to privacy advocates.
In my experience, it's always been easy to set up. Actually using the Time Capsule, I've had one Time Capsule die, and one instance where I used a backup over 8 years. Retrieving the data from the backup was easy, without requiring a reference to a manual, IIRC.
That's true. Phil Schiller said the following in "The Inside Story of Apple’s New iMacs" [1]:
>> Schiller, in fact, has a grand philosophical theory of the Apple product line that puts all products on a continuum. Ideally, you should be using the smallest possible gadget to do as much as possible before going to the next largest gizmo in line.
>> “They are all computers,” he says. “Each one is offering computers something unique and each is made with a simple form that is pretty eternal. The job of the watch is to do more and more things on your wrist so that you don’t need to pick up your phone as often. The job of the phone is to do more and more things such that maybe you don’t need your iPad, and it should be always trying and striving to do that. The job of the iPad should be to be so powerful and capable that you never need a notebook. Like, Why do I need a notebook? I can add a keyboard! I can do all these things! The job of the notebook is to make it so you never need a desktop, right? It’s been doing this for a decade. So that leaves the poor desktop at the end of the line, What’s its job?”
[1]: https://backchannel.com/exclusive-why-apple-is-still-sweatin...
Its bizarre, they have an app you can use on the smaller devices but actively limit the functionality it can have forcing me to use my macbook instead. I wish they would just allow their products to be as useful as they should be.
With Apple's resources the router division cannot have been a distraction, nor would not having it materially or even to any large extent, affect Apple's numbers. Maybe this reflects a retrenching mindset taking hold within Apple?
I agree. It may very well be just what I was used to, but I've always found the networking/configuration software very straightforward.
Time to look at something like Ubiquiti I guess.
Unfortunately details are sparse on their incredibly annoying, scroll-hijacking marketing site. But it seems to be a simple enough, plug-and-play mesh network setup, and the industrial design is quite nice. I think Ubnt just doesn't have the marketing machine needed to really push it in the consumer space.
As I write this, I realize it sounds like an ad, so for clarity: I'm in no way affiliated with Ubiquiti - just a satisfied customer.
Of course, this requires a recent enough firmware version on the AP itself to support that feature, which, when I first tried it, I conveniently did not have, meaning I had to install the controller to upgrade everything anyway...
My lesson for that one is, uh, don't buy the older gear from resellers. Buy the new models from Unifi or Amazon directly.
I setup one years ago with the Asus RT-N16 and haven't looked back since. Makes things like QoS a breeze. Yes, it's somewhat of a pain to setup, but once that's done you have a superb, reliable hardware+ software combination that will perform reliably for years. You can dig into more advanced customisations quite easily afterwards if you like, such as VPN client at the router level.
[1] https://blog.codinghorror.com/because-everyone-still-needs-a...
Why allocate the manpower when the others on the market have caught up with ease of use and this generates less than 1% of your revenue?
Sure, they'll sell you a cheap, shitty N router for $30, but it'll probably catch fire.
I would have gone with a server approach to a wi-fi router, one that does everything in MacOS Server - email, VPN, web, etc..
All of the current changes are taking away.
Aesthetics were and are a huge part of the appeal of an Apple filled desk. Not a one of the other makes gets close yet Apple haven't even asked LG to make their 5k screen look nice or even complementary.
After the underwhelming MBP with rubbish travel-free keyboard, and not having a monitor to sit alongside my iMac, they seem incoherent. Where's the new Mini, Pro, 34" curved Cinema screen or iMac?
We just need someone else to discover aesthetics and they have a real problem to contend with. I care what the overall look is of things in my home.
I felt this coming as long as Apple never added iOS backup support to the Time Capsule. The APFS migration seemed like it would be the final bullet.
Had to ditch my latest-model Time Capsule when I got fiber since Apple doesn't let you change the MTU (required for my PPPoE over fiber), and getting faster Time Machine backups than Apple's anemic CPU could muster was just a plus. I was hoping to reuse it as an 802.11ac bridge to my TV/Media center, but, nope, Apple removed wireless bridging as a feature a couple years ago.
Good riddance.
edit: just got reminded they spent a bunch of money developing special paper and ink for a $300 book instead of this. OK, yeah, no there's logic here.
I also expect that APFS will make superior alternatives to Time Machine from third-parties possible, so IMO in the long term this is a net plus. It is probably unfortunate for Apple that this news got out before Time Machine 2: iCloud Bugaloo could be announced, though.
The $300 book isn't really targeted at consumers.
I honestly think they have become myopic. They aren't seeing the big picture of what some of the less profitable products and features are accomplishing. They just aren't making enough income.
(No attack, just wondering...)
Ok, just checked RT-AC66U as well, which is from 2012, and it still gets updates too.
I'm sure Apple of all companies knows this, but revenue of a particular product doesn't necessarily show the whole picture when some of your brand's appeal is that customers can buy all Apple products and be fairly confident they work well together.
Separately, I'm very happy with Ubiquiti products, but I'm also a power user.
This is what happened to Microsoft, and it took many years and a major internal upset to get them back on a positive track. And now look at Microsoft since they've started diversifying and innovating again: they are providing an OS (and hardware) which is genuinely interesting to professionals in a variety of fields. They are going to steal Apple's thunder here soon, unless Apple really makes an effort.
Something that is well designed and innovative. I for one would pay for one.
The way I see it, Apple excels on the whole overarching synergy thing, while Linux excels on individual component quality. Considering that each component is an independent project, the Linux ecosystem will never be as homogenous as Windows or Mac. That said, it's a trade many of us happily make for the power of choice.
I have two and they've been running for 8 or 10 year, with out failure.
https://computers.tutsplus.com/articles/using-a-raspberry-pi...
https://github.com/abrasive/shairport