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…