5 ms·

$50 honestly seems expensive considering how long home routers have been around. It's not as if it's novel technology. I'd expect cheap mass-produced routers

• core-questions 7y ago
  People pay hundreds for these things on the high end; the market seems to have settled on the price. There may be room to under-cut, but you risk looking like a cheapo option when all the established manufacturers charge more.
• kazen44 7y ago
  $50 is incredibly cheap for a home-router (which also is a wireless access point, a switch and a firewall). Prosumer or enterprise grade hardware is usually magnitudes more expensive. An edgerouter X is $50 for instance, but doesn't have wifi and lacks serious routing features. It is considered a very low end router compared to more expensive stuff from Juniper or Cisco. (even an entry grade router/firewall like an SRX300 will run you back atleast 4x the price of the edgerouter.) One thing these $50 routers lack besides proper software is stability. Most consumer networking equipment has an abysmal track record in terms of reliability.
• quicklyfrozen 7y ago
  They are that cheap... e.g. Microcenter has models in the $15-$25 range. They're pretty much at the too cheap to not work level as they can't afford to develop complex, bloated features at that price point.