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.

Hail Sata full of cables. hollow be thy port.

I like the UFO and Coke can designs personally.

Or you could choose one with wings.

This one does have beam forming antennas. I don’t know if that feature helped, but this router works in my long narrow apartment in a congested area where other routers failed.

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.