Last Router

I replaced my home router.

There was a time I was a YAMAHA devotee. Peak era: multiple RTX2000s and Hitachi GR2000s running in my apartment. Half-rack chassis and 1U servers, all far too large for the room they occupied. The exhaust noise and the heat were enough to guarantee nightly bad dreams.

None of that obsession remains. Now I use eero, everything wrapped up neatly. I pay the subscription. Setup took five minutes on the app. SSID and mesh handled themselves.

Absurdly simple.

But I know what runs behind the simplicity. NAT, firewall, QoS, mesh handover. Every process I once typed line by line into a terminal now executes silently behind a friendly UI.

I think about the firmware engineers. Their abstractions freed me from the command line. The person who once paid fifteen hundred dollars for a first router now happily subscribes. Whether this is decay or maturity, I cannot say.