People won't listen though because in 2016 it seems most people think wires are ritually unclean.
... they don't particularly want to lift floorboards, and drill through floors and ceilings if the wireless solution is 'good enough'.
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.
Don't do that. Instead get a ethernet powerline adapter:
https://www.cnet.com/topics/networking/best-networking-devic...
This is like an engineer not knowing the mains voltage is 230V, or a baker not knowing about standard grades of flour.
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
I had no idea that WiFi was that much better than Ethernet!
( this is why units matter, kids ;)
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.
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.
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. :)
I'm not thrilled about the autoupdate feature of Google WiFi. I wouldn't be surprised if it's leveraged to benefit Google's analytics, or for government snooping. But the greater risk at this point is from criminal hackers. And I prefer running my WiFi routers in bridging mode, anyhow, making it less likely Google will bother tracking my family's browsing from the LAN.
Maintaining my own homegrown router isn't appealing, though. For one thing, all the hardware available for that is sub-par. Solid support for MIMO and beamforming is mostly non-existent except for proprietary stacks; even simultaneous multi-channel is iffy using open source solutions. AirPort always shipped with better than average support for the latest tech, and I'm not keen on going backward in that regard, especially for what should be a performance upgrade.
https://support.google.com/wifi/answer/6246642 has a tl;dr version: "Importantly, the Google Wifi app and your Wifi points do not track the websites you visit or collect the content of any traffic on your network. However, your Wifi points does collect data such as Wi-Fi channel, signal strength, and device types that are relevant to optimize your Wi-Fi performance." and a full explanation of everything it does (or does not) collect, and why.
Apart from Apple's and Google's idiotic antics, what routers require anything more than a browser to configure?
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.
Good luck configuring that with a mac....
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.
With wood floors you can usually avoid much impact and just run cables under the floorboards.
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 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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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'?
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
$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.
The speed and coverage is also fantastic from my experience.
Ubiquity. Or in general: stay away from consumer-grade network equipment.
Airport is amazing for consistent throughput and reliability.
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.
Consumer-grade routers usually are faster. What they are not is more reliable, or easy to use/manage.
I may look into the new google APs, so I can get the latest wireless speeds across the house.
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.
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.
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.
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 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).
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)
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.
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.
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.
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?
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).
There is no need for Apple to be in this market, there is no problem to be solved for 99.9% of people.
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.
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...
same-security-traffic permit intra-interface
static (inside,inside) ...
Time Warner charges $10/month for theirs, and they're awful.
Hopefully, in the near future we can have this done with libre hardware. Cheap POWER stuff would be great.
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