Ironically, it's the innocent-looking white boxes that are hellspawn devices of pure evil that will wiretap your house, force you into a subscription service and have a 2-year planned obsolescence timebomb in it.
Meanwhile anything that resembles an arachnid will let you do whatever you want, support every imaginable open standard, and work with community firmware that will still be supported a decade later.
That rounded white box is a POS At&T locked down fiber modem/router which they patch biweekly at 3am without your control because they don't want people hacking their devices to change the DNS server or anything useful.
It wouldn't be a problem if AT&T let you use your own fiber ONT but they don't which is technically illegal but no one has sued them yet because they are a billion dollar company.
Thankfully the workaround is to grab a supported ONT, upgrade to 2.5g or higher fiber speeds so they are forced to use XGS-PON, then swap in your ONT with some cloned IDs and downgrade back to whatever plan you want. This all allegedly works because businesses that use AT&T as their ISP also don't want to pay money for a proprietary piece of junk, and they have enough power to throw around to demand AT&T allow them to use their own fiber hardware.
Like early wifi routers weren't also stupid looking? I don't think I have ever had one that fit properly anywhere because of their odd shapes and/or antennae, and I've had wifi since 98 or 99.
As an aside: While I was working for a WISP, I came into possession of some older Ubiquity antennas and I used a couple to blast my home network's wifi across my small town so I could use wifi on my phone pretty much anywhere within 3 miles of my house. Shit was rad as fuck.
I'll take one satanic altar please
The Elders of the Internet demand.... a shrubbery!
Eva from wall-e vs the galactic empire
My Soft Round Box got damaged so I took the case off and now it's a Cyborg.
toaster or henge
Mine is white, but with 4 long antenna sticking up. So I think of it more as "deer antlers mounted on the wall."
A sect of MUDders worships Shub-Internet, sacrificing objects and praying for good connections. To no avail — its purpose is malign and evil, and it is the cause of all network slowdown.
“Freela casts a tac nuke at Shub-Internet for slowing her down.”
“Shub-Internet gulps down the tac nuke and burps happily.”
-- Taken from the Jargon File
Mines a small box with two ethernet cables that connect to the switch. Its amazing. It has no wifi built in and as a result I don't have to worry if my stove ore refrigerator is between it and my bedroom.
My fiber modem is sort of a white diamond-shaped tower.
For most males this choice comes down to wether you are married or not.
I'll take option 2 with a lil gandalf figure on top
I use a firewall, so none of these apply to me.
My firewall doesn't have wireless, I have a separate system of access points to provide wifi coverage across my house. Little White/beige squares dotted throughout to propagate the wireless in a coordinated effort to allow clients to connect, backhauled through a PoE switch to the firewall.
Any box my ISP gives me gets put into bridged mode and stuffed in a closet with the rest of my hardware. I never see it.
I don't like having network equipment out in the open, on shelves or whatever. All my aps are ceiling mounted and well out of the way, so they pose no more inconvenience than a smoke detector.
I have long since abandoned the consumer router industry. Most of it is borderline ewaste as far as I'm concerned. I don't trust my ISP to provide a good combination modem/router to use so all of their stuff is restricted to bridged mode, so it acts as a modem only. I won't fault anyone for not doing what I am, it's usually not cheap, but bluntly, I haven't had any significant problems with any of it since switching to this type of network, and I can upgrade any part at any time without throwing the whole thing away like you would have to for a consumer all-in-one wifi router. This path isn't for the feint of heart. It's much more difficult to manage when you need to, but when you get everything configured correctly, you basically can forget that it exists. The only down time I've had has been either power or ISP related. Obviously if the power is out, wifi doesn't work. If the ISP is having trouble getting your connection out to the internet, then all the equipment on my end isn't going to provide internet access, even if it's working flawlessly.
I've taken great pains to ensure that I don't need to look at, modify, or even think about my network or wifi very often or at all. It just works. It blends into the scenery and I don't even see it most of the time.
