[walrus01]

You don't have to buy such a design, the ubiquiti u7 lite and u7 pro are ordinary round white ceiling mount 802.11be AP.

Somehow ordinary non tech consumers got it into their heads that something which looks like a f117 with many spiky antennas sticking out of it must be faster.

[radlad]

I could be crazy, but don't all the external antennas allow for more flexibility with regard to directionality of signal?

I have a U7 Lite and it is very directional compared to other routers I have used (spider style, trash can style, etc.)

[bcrl]

The U7 Lite only does 2x2 MIMO. Compared to 4x4 MIMO in the U6 LR, the U7 Lite therefore does a much poorer job at beamforming (directing the energy of the signal towards the device).

Personally, I find it better to have multiple low end access points (like the TP-Link Archer C80 which has 3x3 MIMO on 5 GHz) deployed to achieve excellent coverage in a house. Sadly, the U7 line is a bit too expensive for that. Plus, I'm loathe to deal with UniFi deployments now that I am well versed in the glass jaws in the platform.

There really is space in the market for a product line that is basically what UniFi is, but done "right". Ie: can be debugged or you can fix it without an internet connection or recover the system when the owner forgets the password and lost access to the email account used for 2FA. UniFi is an absolute nightmare the moment anything goes even slightly wrong.

[diegs]

I went from Unifi to Ruckus APs and never looked back.

You can find older generations on eBay very inexpensively for what they are, install Ruckus Unleashed firmware on them, and operate them completely locally.

They have the best beamforming antennas in the industry and their firmware is rock solid. I'm on some very old models (2.4ghz and 5ghz only) but they work fantastically well. I'll probably upgrade to some wifi 6 models soon.

But for my uses 500-600mbps rock solid throughout my house is plenty. Anything where I want max throughput/low latency/low jitter (mainly gaming) is hardwired. For wifi I care much more about complete and consistent coverage.

[zhengyi13]

Yes, perhaps they do allow for greater flexibility, but that's complex and difficult to do well/reliably, and doing it well/reliably requires signal analysis gear and software modeling that's out of the reach of normal consumers.