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Ask HN: Why have WiFi routers become so expensive?

8 points by nspattak ↗ HN
In February 2022 I bought an Asus RT-AC86U for 85€. Its price has nothing but increased. Today it costs 245€ almost 3X more!!! A 5 year old model that doesn't even support the latest wifi standards. All the Asus modems I occasionally check (as I would like to test mesh) follow a similar pattern. Anyone has an explanation why even Nvidia lowers it's prices but not wifi routeurs?

18 comments

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stop50
Greed?
nspattak
The question is why are they able to inflate the prices like this and get away with ?
stop50
Because its not illegal?
1oooqooq
Exactly the same as GPUs. There's two companies.

if you want top shelf routers, it will have qualcomm chips (cpu/soc/radio). If it is a budget one, it will have mediatek.

Also, we had a flood of demand and new versions coming out. which literary added nothing. Some will wrongly say "mimo", "beamforming", etc... but those were all present since "wifi5" (ac) and have just been "standardized" in wifi6 (ax), wifi6e (ax+6ghz), wifi7 (be)... the real improvement after wifi5 was simply higher frequencies (pointless since your internet pipe is still crap) and more power (by relaxing power limits). really nothing else because even the features that were standardized might not be present or be badly implemented anyway, like half wifi6e routers not even having a 6ghz radio.

psd1
Of course, bumping transmit power on the AP does little to help poor little mobiles that can't transmit back.

Sure, you get 5 bars of signal strength indicated, but your TCP performance is still garbage.

uberman
Ebay in the US has them for 70 bucks, Amazon for 110. Perhaps it is a UK terrif thing
nspattak
Are you sure you are not mistaken with used ones?
KomoD
Probably because it's not being manufactured anymore? Look at other models, they're at perfectly normal prices
mikewarot
Because some people are locked into certain exact models of hardware for all sorts of reasons. That's why there's still a market for PDP11 hardware decades after it became obsolete.

Simply storing something for decades has costs, which factor into the price.

As for the general upward trends in capacity and price, of WiFi gear, we're now at the point where they are using multipath and phased array antennas to get around the Shannon limit on Data transmission, effectively using the same channel more than once. It's fscking magic!

toast0
Fyi, asus's 'aimesh' forces your APs all onto the same channel. That doesn't make sense for me, so while I have multiple Asus routers in AP mode, I run them independently.

Might make sense to get a different brand or model that is more economical.

sandreas
Routers are unreasonable priced. There are routers that cost >200$, because they have a "gaming" in the name and routers that are < 100$ from a cheap chinese brand, that are basically the same hardware.

The wifi chipset, CPU and Memory are the parts that count, maybe also the ethernet ports and usb. So if you wanna buy a good but cheap router, I would buy a used one that has reasonable price and good specs.

I'd also prefer support for Wifi 6(e), but if you are on a budget, old standards high end hardware is really cheap on the used marked.

So here is what I recommend: Look at the OpenWRT list of hardware filtered by ax[1], sort by CPU MHz and look through the table for a good Mediatek / MT chipset in the column WLAN Hardware (the CPU sorting is "alphabetical", not natural, so it might be that the most powerful ones are in the middle of the table).

I recommend:

  - Ubiquity Unify (AP - if you need a router, don't buy)
  - AVM Fritz!Box 7520 / 7530 (not in the list, but a german bargain)
  - Linksys E8450 (aka. Belkin RT3200)
  - GL.iNet GL-MT6000
  - Asus TUF-AX4200 / TUF-AX6000
  - BananaPi BPi R3
  - Xiaomi AX6000 / AX9000
  - Netgear WAX220 (AP)
nspattak
You are right, these are what matter and thanks for the suggestions.

I am not particularly on a budget but I don't either require wifi7, I am not willing to pay 3* more than I should. I am lazy and searching for something that is supported by merlin and I will look into the used market as well.

sandreas
I'm not convinced that I would choose Merlin, because it only supports a very limited amount of devices. However, I had Asus routers in the past and they were not half bad.

If you don't need USB and could switch to OpenWRT, you could go for a Netgear WAX 202 - I got a used one for 50 bucks, pretty stable so far. Or maybe a TP-Link AX 1800 for 60 bucks new.

nspattak
Again, I very much agree with you, very sound advice. The reason I stick with merlin/Asus is that I do not want to spend too much time, I want to buy sth, configure/deploy/forget.
toomuchtodo
Glinet routers are good and reasonably priced.
psd1
I would caution that the cheaper models in the lineup don't have the grunt to deliver the features to a usable degree.

I can run tailscale on the Opal, but it's constrained to ~2Mb/s. The Mango, I can't even download package lists.

dordash
you can build a router using FOSS!