If there’s anything that routers have been in dire need of for a long time now, it’s a well-deserved facelift. Whether they’re made for gamers, media professionals, or just your average household, it seems like they all tend to cycle through a similar smattering of archetypes that fall into three main categories: black with lots of antennas (performance-only), neon-colored with sharp angles (for the “xtreme gamer” in your house), or some muddled combination of the two.
Sure, there are outliers like the nostalgia-heavy Linksys WRT1900ACS or the TP-Link Archer C9, but other than those select cases pretty much every other router on the market right now looks like, well, a router. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, of course, but it’s also not that exciting when you remember that by their very design, wireless routers often need to sit in the most central part of your home in order to get the best signal to every corner of where you live and browse on a daily basis.
Aside from the ultra-enthusiast who likes to show off that they take networking hardware seriously to their guests, most people would prefer to have a router that they actually want to look at sitting on their coffee table. The problem with this though is that without those big, gaudy antennas prodding out from every side of the unit, most routers can suffer performance issues once you get more than 10ft away from the base station.