[mikewarot]

Because some people are locked into certain exact models of hardware for all sorts of reasons. That's why there's still a market for PDP11 hardware decades after it became obsolete.

Simply storing something for decades has costs, which factor into the price.

As for the general upward trends in capacity and price, of WiFi gear, we're now at the point where they are using multipath and phased array antennas to get around the Shannon limit on Data transmission, effectively using the same channel more than once. It's fscking magic!