I Bought a New Router. It Told Me I Was Hacked.

The Ubiquiti UniFi Dream Machine was unexpectedly worth the cost

My beautiful new router.

Last week, I was at the end of my rope with my old router.

I bought the old clunker, a TP-Link Archer C7, in 2015. It was the Wirecutter pick at the time, which gave me license to tell my roommates that I was going to spend $100 on a router.

Now, one apartment later, I have two floors: A first floor and a basement level that acts as my bedroom. The old router’s antennae just couldn’t penetrate into the lower level. It basically meant no Wi-Fi downstairs, which mitigated screens before bed and made my Sanctuary of Slumber Arianna Huffington-approved.

But my smooth, mushy brain wanted to stare at the small, glowing rectangle.

I tried range extenders, learned that they didn’t relay the signal but just created a new network that confused my phone, and then gave up for a month or two. I set up my desktop downstairs with a MoCA adapter that runs internet through the coaxial cables in my apartment, fitting me with a gigabit LAN in my apartment but still no Wi-Fi downstairs.

For a few years, I’ve lurked on r/UniFi, a subreddit dedicated to home and enterprise networking hardware made by Ubiquiti. Their products have always been touted as reliable and extensible. They also have a beautiful user interface, and there are tons of features that I could poke and prod, like granular deep packet inspection and detailed logging.

Then, OneZero’s own Owen Williams wrote about his UniFi setup, and it sent me down the rabbit hole again. A few times. I’d find myself kitting out all the PoE network switches and access points I’d need while eating lunch or during a slow workday. It usually ended with me raising an eyebrow at the price tag and solemnly closing the tab.

Last week, after repeatedly trying and failing to send a photo over my phone’s iMessage from my desk downstairs, I gave up. Cost be damned, I ordered a $329 Ubiquiti Dream Machine from a Microcenter down the street.

The Dream Machine is a little all-in-one machine that can act as the brain, network switch, and central wireless router for your Ubiquiti setup. It also has features that I didn’t…