The design of the humble WiFi router has evolved over time and now it seems every manufacturer is putting a heavy focus on the style. If it has to be on display then aesthetics is going to be part of the decision making so when you decide to purchase that new router it makes sense to base part of the decision making on the design of the product and if it is going to fit in with the home decor. But why are manufacturers putting such a large focus on the looks?
In this article I’m going to explain why you should care and why we are getting the short end of the stick. This is just my own personal opinion and purely circumstantial but I think it would be hard for manufacturers to argue against it. So why are we being led up the garden path? It comes down to 3 things: marketing, shrinkflation and consumer conditioning. That’s right we are all sheep and we like new things but why would a manufacturer want us to start buying an electronic device that looks pretty?
Marketing
If you make something people want then you can charge for it, it makes sense to make routers look better than they have in the past but it’s not just that simple. The marketing team is trying to make routers more of a fashion simple to get these devices out on display. “Keeping up with the Joneses” could be a bit of a stretch but many brands want their products on display in houses so their friends can see it and hopefully it becomes a talking point. Brands had an issue with their own branding where people would hide a router away in a cupboard or behind furniture and the home owner wouldn’t even know what brand router they owned so moving it into a place where you could see it every day would be beneficial. You become more likely to have brand loyalty if you know the brand and have a good experience of the product.
Shrinkflation
We are used to shrinkflation with items like food but a router? Every manufacturer wants to reduce their input cost and if you can do that with clever design and a change in consumer behaviour then the manufacturer is onto a winner. It is cheaper to build a router with internal antennas and it’s cheaper again if you don’t need to give people as much range. But how do you do both without losing performance? Now that the router has been moved out of the cupboard that is one less obstacle the radio signal needs to penetrate so it is not a long bow to stretch to assume they have some wiggle room to play with.
Conditioning
Now that we have given you a device that looks pretty and possibly has less coverage we can start making mesh WiFi more acceptable, but what is the advantage of mesh WiFi in a standard home? People have historically been conditioned to put up with inadequate WiFi for a long time, often because they have only ever used a free WiFi router in their house & the range and speed of these are low and slow. It is an easy sell to a consumer to say they may need 2 or 3 devices to get full coverage in their house so people just believe it. When you buy a 3 pack it sure can feel like a good deal because in your mind you rationalise the expense being spread across 3 devices but you still only have 1 system. The other advantage to the manufacturer is if you aren’t happy with your WiFi performance the standard go to answer is for you to buy more mesh gear from them.
So are they just putting lipstick on a pig? A lot of these good looking devices are basic mesh networks with inferior range compared to some other devices that are designed for performance that use external antennas. Sure they have the advantage of being able to add to the network if you find the coverage isn’t as good as expected but how about just buying the 1 correct system from the outset. I have quite a bit of networking equipment in my home lab and even have a couple of nice looking devices that I keep running so I can have a better understanding of what brands have to offer and evaluate performance but in my use case even a brand new WiFi6 device is inferior to my WiFi5 dinosaur.
Don’t get me wrong, I get blazingly fast speed on the pretty WiFi equipment but they just don’t have the same range as my 6 year old router in the cupboard. I can walk 50 meters away from the house and still have a clear voice call outside but the little ornamental WiFi hotspots stop being reliable half way through the house. I’m sure not all of these designer objects are bad and a handful of them probably have the exact same components and antennas inside as their older looking counterparts but they don’t tend to publish or advertise this information. I will admit if you want 300mbps in every room of the house you are probably going to need more than just one device with external antennas but if I can still watch videos and take calls at my neighbours 30m away it makes sense to keep that ugly router locked away.
One advantage of being conditioned to seeing these devices is that we are being prepared for the next evolution of WiFi that uses millimetre wavelength radio. These radio waves can deliver WiFi about 50–100x faster but it does require direct line of sight to the device. The real use case for this newer WiFi is going to be in large offices and public areas. I’m not sure how often you need 100–200 gigabit speeds at home but we could see some new IoT or augmented reality use cases in the future, hay at one point a 56k modem seemed fast.
So when shopping for your next WiFi solution have a think about what you really need and remember you could be sacrificing performance for looks.
