Thoughts on routers and pricing

As of about a week ago it’s possible to easily buy preflashed routers and other networking equipment from us. There is also a hopefully complete set of documentation on how to connect to other nodes and setup your router.

You’ll probably notice we’re not selling the cheapest option on our supported routers lineup. You can generally go as low as $20 for a working device, but we’ve found that ~$100 is where you stop getting a better router for your money.

After testing dozens of routers most of the $150 — $300 routers you find at Best Buy are generally no better than the $100 option if you know what to look for.

There’s a reason why the Best Buy options are so expensive of course, having a higher priced options attracts people to the ‘middle’ of the price curve. Those shiny $300 routers are designed to justify in your mind the $150-$200 routers.

We experience this same issue putting up a $100 router next to a $25 one, except in our case we’ve made sure the $100 router is really 4x better (it’s actually 5x better according to my testing).

I suppose we could throw in a $300 router that’s not actually 3x better than a $100 router. But I find that hard to justify, so for the time being we’re going to try and steer first world buyers to the GL B1300.