With separate items, one can put the router somewhere that a router makes sense for routing's sake, and the access points where they make sense for wifi's sake.
My router is on a shelf in my unfinished basement, along with the cable modem and a switch, not far from the other household infrastructure. It's a great place for a bunch of cabling (nobody will ever see it unless I deliberately show it to them) and it is trivial to get more wires to that location.
But the basement is a terrible place for a wifi access point, being underground and all.
So for wifi, I've got a fairly unobtrusive access point (a Mikrotik wAP AC) mounted on a central wall on the first floor, with PoE. Unlike the way that home routers are normally used, this access point only has one wire connected to it, and all it will ever need is exactly one wire.
And if I ever want to upgrade that central switch (maybe I grow some plans for some serious NAS usage or something and 10GbE starts making sense), I just... upgrade it. The router stays the same, the wifi stays the same.
If I ever want to make Wifi faster, or add more of it, I just upgrade that part.
All of these components (router, switch, access point) are necessary for the way we commonly use our home networks in 2024. It's nice having things located where they're most useful, and it is also nice being to change individual parts of the system when that is useful.
My router is on a shelf in my unfinished basement, along with the cable modem and a switch, not far from the other household infrastructure. It's a great place for a bunch of cabling (nobody will ever see it unless I deliberately show it to them) and it is trivial to get more wires to that location.
But the basement is a terrible place for a wifi access point, being underground and all.
So for wifi, I've got a fairly unobtrusive access point (a Mikrotik wAP AC) mounted on a central wall on the first floor, with PoE. Unlike the way that home routers are normally used, this access point only has one wire connected to it, and all it will ever need is exactly one wire.
And if I ever want to upgrade that central switch (maybe I grow some plans for some serious NAS usage or something and 10GbE starts making sense), I just... upgrade it. The router stays the same, the wifi stays the same.
If I ever want to make Wifi faster, or add more of it, I just upgrade that part.
All of these components (router, switch, access point) are necessary for the way we commonly use our home networks in 2024. It's nice having things located where they're most useful, and it is also nice being to change individual parts of the system when that is useful.