The Ayn Odin 2

The Ayn Odin 2 with some customisations

My Ayn Odin 2 with a few small customisations.
A higher right analog stick with Skull and Co thumb grip, and the 3D-printed grips that a friend of a friend gave to me.

In the past year or so, there have been one or two handhelds that have come out which have not only met that performance bar of upscaled GameCube and PS2, but can also come to the party for 3DS, Vita, and even Switch emulation. And between the Retroid Pocket 4 Pro and the Ayn Odin 2, the Odin 2 is the one to get because it runs everything flawlessly, has battery life appropriate for 2024, and very few faults overall. There’s no doubt in my mind that if you wanted a modern handheld console to emulate every system that’s possible to be emulated on Android, the Odin 2 should be your first and foremost choice unless you want something pocketable, or with an OLED screen, or you have a very specific budget.

So why haven’t I bought one?

Had I know about the Odin 2 this time last year, I probably would have. It ticks basically every box that I’m interested in, with perhaps the exception of running actual PC titles on it, even though streaming from my PC might be an acceptable compromise. But after looking into it, it just doesn’t make sense to buy one now, 9 months into its lifecycle. It’s like this: one year ago, there was nothing under $600 that could emulate Switch acceptably. But the handheld console landscape is moving so fast that who’s to say what options we’ll have in another 6-12 months? After all, technology moves at such a rapid pace these days that there’s always something better just around the corner. The fact that you can even consider installing and using fibre optics in your home network at something even close to resembling a reasonable cost — something previously unthinkable not that long ago — is proof of this.

Even if no better options appear by the end of the year, the thinking is I’ll still be able to pick up an Odin 2 and be happy. Hell, I could absolutely do that today. But at this late stage of the game, it would be better for me to exercise some patience and wait six months. I’ve been waiting 20 years to be able to play GameCube and PS2 portably, chances are I can absolutely wait another six months. While I’d love something to play GameCube and PS2 portably now, if I’ve waited this long, I can probably wait another year or two, especially if it’s going to be a significant and meaningful improvement over the Steam Deck/Odin 2. Of course, there’s always better tech just around the corner, but honestly, how much better can it get at the sub-$800 price point?

So my question is really: if I pick up an Odin 2 today, am I going to be missing out on something great that’s potentially just around the corner in the next 6/12/18 months? Because the Steam Deck was basically the precursor to this whole handheld renaissance that we seem to find ourselves in (maybe not for retro games specifically, but it seems to have affected retro games nonetheless), and the Steam Deck has only been around for two short years. Based on my own research, there hasn’t been anything that isn’t a handheld PC that had great GameCube, PS2, and Switch performance for under $800, until last year’s Odin 2 and to a similar degree, the Pocket 4 Pro. It just seems like prior to the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 SoC, there just wasn’t anything good available at a reasonable price.

Like, the Odin 2 is already powerful enough, with maybe the exception of some Switch titles (and even then with NCE it may not be as big of an issue as it was), so maybe a more powerful chip isn’t that big of a draw card. Where do they go from here, and what other significant hardware changes can they make? The only potential improvements I can think they can make are having an OLED display, with potentially a higher refresh rate. How good a higher refresh rate for retro gaming is questionable, since 8th-generation and consoles typically target 30fps, and it’s not like you can get Switch games to run at 120fps, but this just serves to prove my point that there’s very little Ayn can do to improve the Odin 2.

But thanks to the header image on this post, you already know I ended up buying an Odin 2. I figure if I can get a few solid months out of it, emulating the GameCube and PS2 classics I grew up with, then flip it for close to what I paid, then that’s probably good enough.

Something I didn’t realise is when people talk about upscaling retro games, they mean actual upscaling. It’s not the kind of upscaling you get when you, say, convert a video to play at a higher resolution, because in those cases you’re just attempting to make something from nothing, and often you don’t get anything meaningfully better than the original.

No, video game upscaling is much better than that. Because the video game has access to the source data (the vertices and polygons which dictate how shapes should be rendered on screen), when you upscale a video game it looks incredible. It’s not perfect, because textures might still show their age even though the underlying models are tack sharp, and any pre-rendered assets like photos or videos that aren’t generated from in-game assets will still look blocky, but for the most part, upscaling games from the GameCube and PS2 era to 1080p looks great, and if you add in a HD texture pack, that’s about as close to a remaster as you can get, barring any actual quality-of-life improvements that an actual remaster might give you.

Or a Switch port, if your game is lucky enough to be in that camp.

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But what about the Steam Deck?

The keen-eyed amongst you will have noticed I failed to mention the the technically-handheld, borderline-portable, Steam Deck in my last retro handheld post. And it’s a curious omission of the handheld that arguably kicked off the portable-computer-as-handheld-gaming-console era that we have today. What makes it downright weird is that I’m arguably part of the ideal target market for the Steam Deck. I have a large, expansive Steam library that’s a mix of triple-A titles (although there’s much less of that these days), some of the most popular indie games, and plenty of releases from years gone by, and yet somehow, I haven’t picked up a Steam Deck in the two and a half years that’s it’s been on sale.

And while there are a couple of reasons for that, including how the Steam Deck isn’t officially available in Australia, so I’d have to import it myself, and if I’m not importing it myself, I’m paying a markup tax to the Australian company that is importing them, which adds to the already significant cost of the Steam Deck, I’m just not sure about the Steam Deck as a product I’m really interested in. The other major reason I don’t own a Steam Deck is that it’s kind of expensive for what it is. It’s a fairly serious investment on the same level as buying a new home appliance, a new graphics card, or even an iPad, all of which you would probably get more use from. If you already have a good-to-great gaming PC, the only drawcard the Steam Deck has for you is being able to play titles portably, and even away from your home.

And the crazy thing is, the specs aren’t even that good. Phones from the same era have high refresh rates 1080p displays, but the Steam Deck is stuck with an (admittedly larger than normal phone size) 7.4-inch, 800p display at 90Hz. But if you compare the Steam Deck to what it can do, then yes, maybe the cost is justified. Being able to play triple-A titles without shelling out for a complete gaming PC is a pretty impressive drawcard indeed.

The problem with doing this, particularly when you already have a great gaming PC, is that playing games portably sounds like a good idea until you realise it’s a compromise in basically every way. Playing away from home sounds like a good idea, at least for the few hours of battery life that you get if you’re playing heavier titles. Sure, you can extend your battery life by turning down the graphics options, but then it becomes a question of how much of a trade-off between battery life and graphical fidelity you’re willing to make. And while you can get perfectly fine battery life if you’re playing lighter, easier-to-run games, you’re really telling me you forked out for an entire Steam Deck so you could play Stardew Valley outside your house? I’m not one to yuck someone else’s yum, but that seems like a pretty wild decision to me.

But none of this is new if you’re a member of the PC master race. There’s always been this dichotomy of what you can run acceptably on your current hardware, and in particular what settings you can tweak to make it run at an acceptable frame rate versus still having enough graphical bells and whistles to make you feel immersed. If there’s one thing Valve really accomplished with the Steam Deck, it was that they put this power of choice in the palm of your hand. Well, hands, given how large the Steam Deck is.

While consoles have mostly been immune from this, in the past few years we’ve definitely seen games that have started giving console gamers the choice between lower resolution, less graphical effects, and a higher frame rate, or a higher resolution, more graphical effects, and a lower frame rate. It’s becoming increasingly more common to see games offer the choice between 4K at 30 fps, or something like 1440p but at 60 fps or more.

What’s interesting about all of this is that if it’s retro emulation I’m interested in, the Steam Deck has been able to play GameCube and PS2 portably since it launched, and I hear battery life when playing retro consoles is even acceptable. Not great, mind you, but acceptable. But one of the major draw cards of the Steam Deck, and why it commands such a high price in the first place, is because it can play PC games. Again, you can do what you like, but buying a Steam Deck for retro emulation seems like a strange decision when there are other devices that can emulate retro consoles just as well as it can with better battery life. Well, one or two, and only since the last year.

But as someone from the Game Boy Pocket generation (I never owned one personally, but friends did), the Steam Deck is huge and ungainly by comparison. Yes, all that gaming goodness has to go somewhere, not to mention the battery to power it all AND get acceptable battery life for what is essentially a smaller laptop, and a lot of the size is dictated by the screen size of the device. But there’s just no getting around just how cumbersome the Steam Deck, and most other PC-based handhelds including the ASUS ROG Ally, the Lenovo Legion Go, or the MSI Claw, really are. I don’t think handheld gaming consoles have to be pocketable, necessarily, but I don’t to want to draw attention unnecessarily in public by pulling out a Steam Deck and gaming on the bus/train/plane. It’d be like taking an iMac to a Starbucks. Sure you can, but do you really want to? Do you really want to be that guy?

So when you ask me “what about the Steam Deck?” I say that while it’s may be a reasonable product at a reasonable price, it’s not for me. It’s not even that I prefer playing most games with a keyboard and mouse, or that I don’t have any games that wouldn’t be suitable for playing on it, or even the fact that it’s large, bulky, and kind of pricey. It’s really all of those things, which make it unsuitable for what I’m looking for in a portable handheld console.

Now if and when Valve decide to release something like a Steam Deck mini, I would definitely be interested depending on the compromises that they decide to make for a smaller form factor. But for the time being, the search continues for my perfect handheld console.

The retro handheld console and software emulation rabbit hole

TrimUI Smart Pro

The TrimUI Smart Pro handheld console.
Basically a perfect modern GBA/DS emulator. It can run N64 and PSP, but I wouldn’t recommend it.

Every couple of years, I’ll go on a handheld gaming bender where I eschew all responsibilities and spend as much time as possible with my head buried in a handheld console, playing a game that might have been released 20 years ago. For those couple of weeks, I’ll be a teenager again, on holidays and having nothing to do but play video games on a handheld.

By any measure, we’re long overdue for one of those times. While Covid and lockdowns might have been the ideal time to dust off one or more of my old handhelds, I think I was more concerned about surviving and avoiding Covid than I was with playing a handheld console.

One of the great things about handheld gaming consoles like the 3DS and Vita — and indeed, all consoles — is that you can expect them to work 100% reliably with every game that was released for them, because that’s just how consoles work. There’s no performance issues. No incompatibilities. If you have a copy of the game and a working console, they you can always expect to play it, whether that’s 20 years ago when the console was first released, now, or 20 years from now. I know that I’ll be able to pull out my 3DS or Vita, give it a charge, and be able to pick up right where I left off. And that’s the beauty of consoles; they just work.

But as much as I love the Game Boy Color that I grew up with, the Game Boy Advance SP I eventually received, and the Nintendo DS that ended up rounding out the handhelds of my youth, I know this isn’t sustainable indefinitely.

The main problem with the handhelds that I have is that they, like me, aren’t getting any younger. The battery it has now is likely the best battery it’s ever going to have, and while 3D scanning and printing has come a long way and you’ll probably be able to buy replacement plastic parts, that’s not necessarily guaranteed for anything else including screens or other electronics. They’re not making any new 3DSes or Vitas, so there’s no way to get a new one unless I’m willing to pay a premium for one on the second hand market. Which means it’s a one way street for these handhelds, unless I get lucky and find a good second hand model for a non-exorbitant price. So as much as I want to be able to play all my Vita games on my Vita, or play all my 3DS games on my 3DS, I know that one day, that isn’t going to be possible due to time marching ever forward. Parts will break. Batteries will wear out. And when that happens, there’s no guarantee I’ll be able to restore them to working condition. Even if I can guarantee access to games that I want to play, which in 2024 and the age of digital downloads is absolutely not a given seeing as Nintendo has already shut down the 3DS eShop and Sony was about to do the same thing with the Vita PlayStation Store until they received backlash and reneged, there’s no guarantee that the hardware is going to last. How many consoles from 20 years ago do you know of, much less working examples?

Obviously this isn’t an option for even older handhelds like the GBA; in those cases the ageing hardware is even more of a limitation, and getting worse and worse every day. So for the purposes of gaming on a retro handheld like the GBC, GBA, or even a DS, then emulation is really the best option, with all of the inherent advantages and disadvantages that brings.

The question is whether I’m willing to live with the tradeoffs of imperfect software emulation for the conveniences of modern hardware and software. Modern hardware in this case is things like hall-effect analog sticks and triggers, USB-C charging, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and displays with such contemporary technologies like IPS (or ideally OLED, like the Vita had all the way back in 2012) and actual pixel density far above the handful of pixels that older consoles used to have. I’ve been PC gaming at 4K since 2015 at a healthy, if not incredible, 163ppi, so going back to anything less than 720p on a 5 inch display (293ppi) seems like such a huge step backwards when you consider that even the very first Apple Watch had 326ppi in 2015. Which, I’ll remind you, was almost ten years ago.

Modern software, on the other hand, means I can use software to emulate whatever console I’m interested in, provided my device has enough power to run those games. Whether that’s an Android or Linux-based handheld, or something like the PC-based Steam Deck, mostly depends on what I’m interested in playing given the hardware is more or less the same. Android, for example, currently doesn’t have emulators for Wii U, PS3, Xbox, or Xbox 360, and while that might change in the future, that’s the way it is right now.

Conceptually, I think I’m OK with having a device that doesn’t run everything. I think it would be weird to play GBA games on 6 or 7 inch screen, for example, irrespective of how good the integer scaling is, but I think a device that runs GBC, GBA, and even DS games could work. Then if I wanted to, I’d either have 3DS games on my 3DS, Vita games on my Vita, and potentially have another device for 3DS, Vita, and every other 8th-generation console, including GameCube, PS2, and maybe even Switch. From a hardware console perspective, this sort of separation works great as well because retro handheld consoles fit into one of a handful of tiers of modern hardware, each with varying power and price to handle its own set of retro handhelds.

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The 10GbE, all-fibre home network rabbit hole

My paltry AliExpress-special 8-port 2.5G switch

When I moved out of home in 2015, I needed my own home networking equipment. And unfortunately, moving back to ADSL2+ from FTTP NBN was every bit as awful as it sounds. I absolutely don’t remember why I ended up choosing the venerable Asus DSL-AC68U for my all-in-one home wireless modem and router, so I won’t pretend to, but I did, and for the past nine years, it’s done an absolutely bang-up job making sure I have the internets/pipes filled with cats/access to the information superhighway on all my devices. That means it’s time for an upgrade!

Or it was, anyway. Read part one and two of that saga.

Enter: the 10GbE home networking rabbit hole, and cue the OCAU thread with over 1500 posts discussing when 10GbE will become consumer-level technology.

Home networking gear has changed a bit in the past 10 years. 2.5Gb network interfaces are becoming more and more common; my Thunderbolt 4 dock has one, as does the B660 motherboard I built my new NAS with. And at the upper end, it’s not uncommon to find 10GbE RJ45 ports as standard, whether that’s on your top-of-the-line PC motherboard, or the iMac Pro (RIP), or today’s Mac Studio.

Which is why it’s strange that plain ol’ gigabit still seems to be the standard for home networking. Yes, home internet speeds haven’t increased anywhere nearly as much; only within the last couple of years has gigabit internet become possible in Australia, but it’s still uncommon. I think we have other countries to thank for even the adoption of 2.5G as a kind of gateway to faster wired networking speeds, given that in other countries multi-gigabit internet is not only possible, but common. But within that same time period, NVME SSDs have become near-ubiquitous, bringing speed increases of over 20 times their spinning rust predecessors, trading storage capacity for speed. So why are we just now upgrading to home network technology that’s only a paltry two and a half times faster than what we currently have?

There’s a myriad of reasons, including slow internet, but I think the main reason is that for most consumer uses, there’s just not many real reasons to have a faster network connection between your devices. Your Netflix experience isn’t noticeably improved by having a faster connection between your phone or computer, because even mediocre NBN connections can handle a 4K stream of your favourite TV show. Most people aren’t transferring huge files between their computers, so the practical applications of faster network connections are limited, despite computer-specific storage getting faster, not larger. Because if you’re not storing files in the first place, there’s also no need to transfer them between computers. I suspect it’s also why successive Wi-Fi releases have been focused on better Wi-Fi more than they have been about raw speed increases; more efficient usage of the wireless channels we have available, opening up new wireless spectrum, smarter usage of airtime, that sort of thing. If Wi-Fi is already fast enough, even faster speeds benefit few, but more efficient Wi-Fi benefits everyone, even those who aren’t hitting theoretical maxes.

But what if you’re a nerd?

A version of the trickle-down philosophy applied to technology says that as businesses and enterprises upgrade their own equipment, you can often grab upgrades to your own gear for fractions of the cost of what said business would have paid for it originally. I’m not saying that this has completely happened with 10GbE networking gear, but running a 10GbE fibre optic network at home is now within the realms of possibility, and more importantly, at something of a reasonable cost.

If you only have two devices that you want to connect up at 10GbE speeds, you can pick up two SFP+ PCIe cards for about $100 each, connect them directly with a Direct Attach Copper cable for $50-100, and still use standard Ethernet to connect to your switch and your actual internet connection. If you have more than two devices that you want to connect, that’s probably where you’ll need a SFP+ switch of some kind. But even at $130 for an 8-port 10G SFP+ switch on AliExpress, roughly $50 for each SFP+ module, then your optical cables on top of that, it’s still well within the realms of possibility to go to a mostly-fibre home network. And unlike other IT equipment, networking hardware has a lifetime measured in decades. Barring incredible breakthroughs in technology, there’s every possibility that any 10GbE equipment you buy today will be useful in 20-30 years from now, although I’d be slightly concerned about the longevity of your 10GbE SFP+ PCIe cards. For that reason, I’m on the fence about splurging on the 25Gb SFP+ versions. Even though they’re backwards compatible with 1/2.5/5/10Gb, who knows what kind of PCIe tech we’ll have in 20 years. For reference, that’s about the same period of time that it took for PCI to die out and be overtaken by PCIe. Although the PCIe train doesn’t seem to be stopping anytime soon, it’s foolish to think it’ll be around forever.

The only problem with going to an all-fibre 10GbE home network is that you will, inevitably, have devices that you can’t plug an SFP+ transceiver into. As far as these devices go, you basically have two options. Either you keep using them on standard 1/2.5G copper, or you put them on wireless. Unfortunately, there aren’t any options for an all-in one switch that has 4+ 10G SFP+ ports as well as 4+ 1/2.5G RJ45 ports, so either you’re stuck using 1/2.5G/10G RJ45 transceivers in your SFP+ ports, or you run two switches, one for your optical network, and one for your standard copper one. You can upgrade your copper transceivers to optical ones eventually, but for heat concerns you want to limit how many copper transceivers you’re using, although at 1/2.5G speeds this probably isn’t too bad, I’ve only read about heat issues with 10G copper transceivers.

As it stands, I think it would make little financial sense to upgrade some parts of my network to fibre 10G links. I could direct connect my PC and new NAS with 10G or even 25G, then do my router and switch with at least fibre, but from there it gets tricky. There are few practical ways to do 10G or fibre on laptops and even fewer economically friendly ones — despite Thunderbolt 4 being 40G — so it doesn’t seem worthwhile, and especially not when it would be a downgrade in terms of speeds over the current 2.5G connections. My end-game home networking setup would be 10G between my router and switch, then 10/25G from a switch to every computer that supports it, 2.5G to everything that doesn’t, and wireless everything else.

As fun as a theoretical mostly-fibre network is, its practical uses are limited at best. Probably why faster home networking hasn’t caught on. I’d consider running fibre between my router and switch in the future, just because fibre cabling is slightly less noticeable when I’m skirting it around the edge of my rooms.

But otherwise, 2.5G between computers is plenty fast enough.

Just like 640k of RAM out to be enough for anybody.

The new home network, part II

Previously, on Prison Break:

For the past nine years, a venerable Asus DSL-AC68U wireless modem/router has dutifully been providing access to the pipes filled with cats to all my devices. It’s done its job so well, faultlessly, that I feel like I need to put it out to pasture while it still can be repurposed as someone else’s wireless router. Besides, it’s 2024 now, and the Wi-Fi 5 that it came with is positively pedestrian compared to what we have now, putting aside the glaring limitations of Australian internet speeds or your device’s ability to utilise that kind of speed. Plus, WPA3 is also a thing now too, and any security upgrade is always worthwhile.

The MikroTik Hex has been rock solid as a router. After a solid week of Googleing and configuring, I think I have it set it up just how I want.

In many ways, RouterOS reminds me a lot of when I played with dd-wrt all those years ago. There’s just as many options to configure, and while that means there’s a bit of a learning curve, especially if you want to start from scratch, basically everything is configurable, and there’s very little hand-holding. Want to use one of the Ethernet ports as WAN? Of course, take your pick. Want to remove one of the Ethernet ports from the bridge and use it as a backup/dedicated management port? No problem! RouterOS will tell you when your config is invalid, but it won’t stop you from doing something stupid if it is technically possible. It’s absolutely possible to lock yourself out from your router if you’ve configured management interfaces to be only accessible certain interfaces/network ranges, so it’s absolutely possible to shoot yourself in the foot. If you want, you can start from literal scratch; no DHCP server, no DNS, no firewall rules. I can tell you now; you haven’t truly lived unless you have setup your own DHCP server, even if all that really means these days is ticking a box to turn it on and configuring a few options like your desired IP address range. The next best thing is customising the one that comes with the standard default config, which is what I ended up doing.

But did the Hex fix what marginal levels of bufferbloat I had? Yes, absolutely, although I don’t have SQM1 enabled all the time. For whatever reason, Opticomm FTTP connections are usually over provisioned in that I get slightly faster speeds (usually around 110 Mbps down, 45 Mbps up) than what I actually pay for (100/40), so I have SQM disabled outside of peak periods so I don’t miss out on that little bit of extra speed. It’s a small thing, but the way SQM is most noticeable is when I’m downloading something and watching a YouTube video at the same time. With SQM off, when that download is saturating my connection, my YouTube video drops quality and starts stuttering like it’s buffering over a dial-up connection. But with SQM enabled, I can download something and watch YouTube at the same time, without any loss in quality and without any buffering pauses. It’s a small thing, but SQM has made a minor but appreciable impact on my internet quality. If nothing else, now I can use my internet connection with impunity. Not like I didn’t before, but now I know it will actually work when I want it to, irrespective of whatever else I might be doing.

And yes, the Hex has limitations in terms of throughput with SQM enabled, but thanks to Australian internet speeds, I can save money by having a cheaper router. As it stands, apparently the Hex is good up to about 200-500Mbps with SQM enabled. Given that I’m not planning to upgrade my internet speeds anytime soon, that’s plenty, but if and when I do, a RB5009 (or its successor of the time) has my name on it. I’m still tossing up whether I want to “upgrade” to 250/25 for $4 more per month. While that may not be worth it, I can absolutely recommend SQM on any modern internet connection. If you have a one person household it might not be that big of a deal, but even I’ve noticed it, so I can only imagine how great it would be in a family home.

But honestly, the Hex is too fully-featured for my meagre networking requirements. I’m not running my own ISP, nor do I need any kind of failover. Fancy routing rules for specific traffic, or complicated NAT rules, are also outside of what I want out of my home network. I’m not even using VLANs or anything that would require me to know more about networking than I currently do. But it’s good to know that I can, if I want to in the future, or if my networking circumstances change, I can do all of that without having to redo my entire home network setup.

If I have hesitations about the Hex, is that it’s fairly basic in terms of features. While it does have a microSD card slot and a USB port, there are “only” gigabit Ethernet ports on the thing, no 10G SFP+, no PoE, and I can’t run containers on it like you can on some higher-end MikroTik hardware. It feels bad buying networking gear with only gigabit Ethernet in 2024, but unless I want to spend many hundreds more dollars and buy one of those little fanless mini-PCs that come with 2.5G/10G SFP+ ports and run RouterOS on that, I’m stuck with the hardware that MikroTik currently offers. I think the RB5009 would be great, but as it is, I can probably wait until the next iteration, as there’s basically nothing the Hex doesn’t do for me today. That changes if I get gigabit internet, but I can’t see that happening anytime soon, especially with the state of internet infrastructure in Australia right now. Further compounding this is that while you can get gigabit internet on NBN, the problem here is that Opticomm doesn’t seem interested in competing with the NBN2 or even offering higher speed tiers, so the fastest that I can get is 500/200 at roughly triple what I currently pay. For a one-person household, that just doesn’t seem worth it.

So for now, the Hex has this strange dichotomy between incredible software with mid-tier hardware — fine, capable hardware that’s more than enough for home network usage, but lacking a few niceties and/or esoteric features that would have been “nice to have” in 2024.

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The new home network

Asus DSL-AC68U wireless modem router

Next year will be 10 years since I bought any new home networking gear. Compared to typical IT gear lifetimes, where you’re normally replacing gear every couple of years, hitting double digits on anything is an impressive feat that usually represents one of two things. Either you over-invested to begin with in the name of “future-proofing”, even if you couldn’t fully use the gear at first, or there have been so many other expenses/upgrades ahead of it that you haven’t even thought about upgrading something that works perfectly well. As the old adage goes: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

But look, I’m not here to judge your personal technology choices. Merely provide some insight into some of my own, a cautionary tale or two, and some helpful anecdotes along the way. If we’re lucky, maybe we’ll get all three in a single post, but if not, two out of three ain’t bad.

For the past nine years, a venerable Asus DSL-AC68U wireless modem/router has been dutifully providing access to the interwebs to all my devices. It’s done its job so well, faultlessly, that I feel like I need to put it out to pasture before it starts getting ideas and starting the robot uprising that every sci-fi has warned us about. Besides, it’s 2024 now, and putting aside the glaring limitations of Australian internet speeds or your device’s ability to utilise that kind of speed, the Wi-Fi 5 that it came with is positively pedestrian compared to what we have now. Plus, WPA3 is also a thing now too, and any security upgrade is always worthwhile.

When I was waiting for the internet to be connected in my first apartment, I was able to plug a USB 4G modem into it and have the AC68U share it to all my devices. And when that same apartment joined the 21st century and upgraded to NBN, albeit on the slightly-inferior FTTB version, the AC68U just kept on working. And now that I’m on Opticomm (i.e. non-NBN) FTTP, it just keeps on working. I have no doubt that it would keep doing so until one of two things happened: it releases the magic smoke and spontaneously combusts into a small pile of ash, or the heat death of the universe. Whichever comes first.

That means it’s time for an upgrade! But to what?

Home networking gear is boring in the best possible way. The ideal scenario is that you set it up once, and don’t ever touch it again unless you’re changing something. But if you’re like me, you’ll spend a few weeks every ten years fiddling with it, then never touch it again. That’s basically how I’ve run my AC68U over the years, besides upgrading the firmware every now and again, or forwarding a port here and there. Like I said, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

I have basically three options for upgrading my home network.

I consider myself pretty lucky (for the purposes of picking home networking gear), in that I live by myself in a small apartment. That means I don’t need a fancy mesh system, or multiple APs to cover the whole thing. Because I’m the only one that uses the network, I can wire up all my computers for the latency and consistency advantages wired connections provide, put everything else on wireless, and have a pretty simple setup overall.

It would have been easy to pick up something like the 2024 version of the AC68U, an all-in-one wireless router. This time around, I won’t even have to buy something with an ADSL modem, because I’m not planning to live in a place with ADSL ever again. But as ugly as the aesthetic of most of today’s wireless routers are, surely there are better options? Some of the Wi-Fi 7 wireless router options from TP Link don’t look too bad, although they are a little on the pricey side. But what if I wanted a slightly less consumer option? After almost a decade with the Asus and never touching all the marketing buzzwords in its web interface and going straight to the advanced settings, what if I wanted to step it up a notch?

Ubiquity seem to be the current flavour of the month for their prosumer networking gear. Their new-ish UniFi Express is a nice little all-in-one that I could probably recommend pretty comfortably to anyone who wanted something configurable, but backed with a great user interface that makes setting it all up easy enough. I can even see myself trying out a UniFi Express to see if I like the Ubiquity ecosystem as a whole, as it’s also a pretty cheap entry point into the UniFi ecosystem. It would probably also be suitable for someone to deploy at a “secondary” site like their parent’s house to replace their ageing network gear, too, and even comes with cool features like remote management.

But as nice as the UniFi Express is, it “only” comes with Wi-Fi 6, so wouldn’t be that much of an upgrade. It’s also lacking some features. There’s no USB port, for example, if you wanted to share a 4G/5G USB modem between all your devices, just like I had to do while I was waiting for the internet to be connected at my place after moving in. That isn’t a huge deal these days given the relatively fast provisioning times of NBN, but it’s a nice to have. There’s also only one LAN port, like Ubiquity expect you to have a switch if you plan to network a few computers together like it’s 1999 or something. It’s a reasonable assumption, but would it have killed Ubiquity to put a few more Ethernet ports on the thing? Fortunately, this also isn’t a big deal for me as I already have a switch connecting my computers together on a LAN like it’s 1999.

Which brings us to the third option, separate out my router, switch, and wireless access point into three separate devices. While there’s nothing particularly wrong with having an all-in-one wireless router, sometimes you just can’t find the right device at the right price. There’s also something about the modularity of having three separate devices, meaning that if you want to upgrade something in the future, you can do so without having to replace everything. But now instead of having one decision to make, I have three! Make that two, on account of the fact I already have a switch. It’s an 8-port, 2.5G RJ45 switch with one 10G SFP+ port from Keeplink, which you can also have for the low price of around $70 if you’re willing to buy it from AliExpress.

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