If you want plain unassuming looking hardware get dedicated wifi access points and place them all over the building. There are plenty of those shaped liked big smoke detectors.
If you want single device there are also quite a few trash can shaped home routers.
Almost none of the Ubiquity stuff looks like that. Xiaomi has plenty of white/gray cylinders or boxes with rounded corners. TP-link has whole Deco series, Asus has ZenWifi series. Majority of MikroTik non rack mounted hardware also targets more neutral design.
You also have to consider who is the target audience for dedicated all in one wifi routers. Majority of regular people are fine with the WiFi that's builtin the modem provided by their ISP. Any serious commercial office will have the IT team to setup separate (rack mounted) router/switches and ceiling mounted access points that look like previously mentioned smoke alarms. People with large enough house to need multiple access points but aren't IT specialists willing to wire up Ethernet everywhere -> various product lines described as mesh routers. Like the trash can shaped TP link Deco series and similar from other manufacturers. If your house is not that big, nothing stops you to buy one of them and ignore the mesh functionality. That leaves people living in small enough house/apartment to be served by single router/switch/Wifi access point combo but for some reason not being satisfied what the ISP provides and also wanting multiple wired connections. Exclude the IT specialists willing to set up home lab and you are left with gamers (potentially impressed by black spider) and few others who have hopefully have enough rationality to place the router where it's not an eyesore or picking some of the previously mentioned stuff.
Another factor is move from antennas that are simple correctly size wire maybe with some spiral which easily fits in small rounded antenna to flat pcb antennas which encourage more rectangular design of the antenna housing and rest of the router. A lot of it is still partially just for the show, trying to give the impression "this one has more/bigger antennas must be better WiFi", but oversized partially empty plastic antenna housing were a thing even before current spider trend.
White slightly rounded 8 legged spider still looks like spider. Trash cans have a bunch of antennas but they hide them in larger volume. Dedicated access points have the advantage of being placed more predictably (near ceiling with little obstacles), they also have advantage of being distributed less work for each of them instead of single router covering whole house.
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.
I have a U7 Lite and it is very directional compared to other routers I have used (spider style, trash can style, etc.)
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.
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.
As for why it needs multiple antennas, it's for MIMO and beam forming.
I bought it in anticipation of the Nintendo DS having WiFi capabilities, which I had never heard of before (I was like 13 or 14 then). Had to convince my parents to get broadband internet too.
And they don't look fugly.
It is a tremendous shame that cisco hasn't opensourced / unlocked this generation of kit.
Cisco's mobility express just runs on one of the APs and can fail over to another of the APs; it's a slick piece of software.
And yes, it isn't open source, which is a real shame since cisco's killed it (as far as I can tell) and it probably represents an enormous and sophisticated investment in effort and engineering and it'll just melt into entropy.
I loath cisco and don't recommend their kit lightly. In this one case, they seem to have accidentally made (for my use case, running 5 APs at home) a perfect product. They're cheap, extremely reliable, my wife doesn't hate them (though mostly they're in the attic or basement; only one is visible), they've got a (relatively) easy to use UI that manages all of them at once, and (Except for the switch 2) they seem to just work even though I've got vlans and lots of SSIDs and other goofy stuff).
If I had a simpler house to support, I'd just get a single WRT capable "big fast" router / AP...
I'll put in an ebay search notification for when the R650 (and R750) for $50 each and maybe it'll ding in a couple years and I'll be in a place to swap out the 3802 network I've got running now...
As far as I can tell, in this one case (with mobility express) it seems like Cisco accidentally did something overall (IMO) "good" for the world by making it possible for their kit to be reused by some part of the world where someone will get utility out of the still very nice equipment and somehow cisco won't see a dime from that "someone is using cisco equipment" event.
Mobility express isn't perfect, but considering the cost of the gear and the cost of the license, it is pretty darned good. I suspect some product manager at cisco got fired for accidentally making the world not quite as bad a place as it could be if cisco extracted license fees on all the 2802, 3802, and 4800 access points or otherwise sent them to the e-waste bin 4 years early.
You have any docs on how to set these up? I believe a firmware change is required.
That said, the cisco firmware for this specific generation of access points is actually free and trivial to get -- create yourself a cisco account and go to downloads and download the 3802 "mobility express" firmware. The last ME firmware came out in 2024 and all this equipment and software is now totally unsupported by cisco so don't run PCI transactions at home... I'd also avoid running their captive portal or some of their other weird features...
Actually setting it up is a bit of a chore but it is a full featured "enterprise" (cough) AP management system with all the knobs and twiddles you could ask for.
It's really only a good idea if you don't value your time (like me) or if you have a sprawling plaster house where you want to have lots of cheap access points instead of a couple super fast ones.
Lastly, for better or worse, I haven't been able to make my kid's switch 2 work on the network.
Uni has an adapter for USB to Ethernet (if wired is an option) that works with those Nintendo devices, I have one that an extended family member borrowed (unknown if the Switch was a 1 or 2).
But in the one specific case of mobility express, you can ... just download it. Unexpected but actually pretty cool.
You still have to figure out installing and configuring it, which is mildly tedious, and you'll probably need one of those cisco serial cables, but it is an exciting side-quest instead of a dirty forum crawl.
To bring it back to "openwrt" -- this nonsense by cisco, broadcom, HP, IBM, etc is why generation after generation the "enterprise" market is dying -- they're excluding 90% of the would-be engineers from the job market protecting their e-waste from secondary or later reuse, likely just on the off-chance they might make a tiny amount of money downstream. But I guess that's not a line-item that shows up in the quarterly reports (what's the value of "community goodwill" ?)
[1]: https://www.networkworld.com/article/967954/beamforming-expl...
But it's probably easier / cheaper to get maximum coverage at larger distances from a single AP using a big array of sticking out antennae, and that's what a normal home user is going to want.
I feel like there's an untapped market here. I want them to go with the alien spaceship concept all the way thru; I wanna see mini Death Star mesh nodes, X Wing routers and Millennium Falcon access points, dammit. Or hell, cross the multiverse and give me Borg Cube mesh nodes, complete with green shiny LEDs that actually indiacte network/hardware status.
I love the phrasing, we usually call this design language as transformers mating.
I guess they think consumers need them to look like this crap.
This lends itself to a spider like design with just a ton of antennas sticking out of a box, or a trash can with the antennas hidden inside around the outside edge.
Do you have other ideas for how to lay it out?
https://mikrotik.com/product/hap_be3_media
https://eero.com/shop/eero-pro-7
https://www.asus.com/us/networking-iot-servers/whole-home-me...
Another setup is circular or semicircular. I suppose it allows for a more uniform directional diagram across the entire 360°, because a straight phased array has harder time emitting sideways.