Comment by kstrauser 13 hours ago
Heartily seconded! A friend recommended I get one and now I push all my other technical friends to buy one, too.
My wife and I traveled a bit this year and it was great having all our gadgets connecting to a single AP under our control. It’s easily paid for itself by avoiding ludicrous per-device daily charges.
My wife’s work WiFi is handled by a gl.inet 150 (https://www.gl-inet.com/products/gl-ar150/) which is tucked behind her desk since at least 2019. Vanilla openwrt on it, provides WiFi from an Ethernet slot in the wall.
Uptime is in years, it’s invisible and chugs along without visible power draw. All her devices connect to it, including her Cisco voip phone. It autossh to my ovh server with remote port forward for remote admin. Cost me 15€ in 2016.
>> I'm not sure why this is so hard to understand for manufacturers
> My wife’s work WiFi is handled by a gl.inet 150 (...) since at least 2019. All her devices connect to it (...) Cost me 15€ in 2016.
I think this answers GP's question as (yet another) solid reason why manufacturers "can't understand" prosumer needs - it's because targeting prosumers, or generally making products that "just works", is very bad for sales down the line.
Maybe, maybe not.
Some companies aren't very big, and neither are their budgets. And of course, it might be said that there is no solution more permanent than a temporary one.
We've got a large-ish color laser printer (IIRC, an HP 4600) at one of our locations. It's not a big place; it has only had as many as 3 people working there regularly and has been normally staffed by exactly 1 person for the last several years.
When we moved into that building, a missing link was noticed: The printer did not feature wifi, and there was no way to get a clean ethernet drop to it without visible external conduit. The boss man didn't like the idea of conduit.
To get it working for now, I went over to Wal-Mart and bought whatever the current rev of Linksys WRT54G was. I put some iteration of Tomato on it so it could operate in station mode and graft the printer into the wifi network.
I plugged that blue Linksys box in back in 2007; it turned 18 years old this year.
It's pretty little slow by modern wifi standards, and the 2.4GHz band is much more congested than it used to be, but: It still works, and nobody seems motivated to spend money to implement a better solution... so it remains.
Readers of HN will value flexibility and extensibility, but the other 99% of the folks there are fine with totally locked-down devices because it’s the only thing they know of. The lack of extensibility likely doesn’t affect sales/profit in any significant proportion.
Convenient to connect all devices to one WiFi. E.g. baby camera is on same WiFi as laptop etc.
I think most travel APs can generally do this, but the feature that makes GL.iNet products popular is: extensibility. I'm not sure why this is so hard to understand for manufacturers, but making products useful via extensibility is a sure fire way to open your target market directly up to prosumers. And those are the buyers that will find you.
I own two of their products, one of them I bought in 2019 and can still run what I need to on it.