I’ve grown to hate these routers. They only seem useful if you live in an apartment and place them in the middle and your walls are made of paper. Bought a few through the years thinking more money = better wifi, but wall construction and placement have much more impact. Living in a brick house, they’re pretty shit. I’ve switched to non gamified wifi AP’s connected to ethernet and the wifi’s been great. Still prioritize wired wherever possible though.
One of the worst things about those routers other than having generally poor coverage despite looking like a Crown of Thorns was that if you actually took advantage of the more advanced features like VLANs, port forwarding, static routes, FTP and all that stuff and set it up… It inevitably seemed that there was a 99% chance that a firmware update would not allow you to restore a backup of the router config on the updated device!
That happened a couple times, spent days getting everything set up only to find out the firmware update refused to load a config made with an older version. F that. Never used those routers again.
Used to live in a 2 story house built in the 1900’s. It had plaster & lath walls. I ended up with 4 AP’s scattered about before we had decent WiFi coverage.
If something looks cool and flashy and has tons of “extra functions” I stay the fuck away from it because I know the target demographic and I know it’s going to be shit in surprising ways.
I’ve grown to hate these routers. They only seem useful if you live in an apartment and place them in the middle and your walls are made of paper. Bought a few through the years thinking more money = better wifi, but wall construction and placement have much more impact. Living in a brick house, they’re pretty shit. I’ve switched to non gamified wifi AP’s connected to ethernet and the wifi’s been great. Still prioritize wired wherever possible though.
One of the worst things about those routers other than having generally poor coverage despite looking like a Crown of Thorns was that if you actually took advantage of the more advanced features like VLANs, port forwarding, static routes, FTP and all that stuff and set it up… It inevitably seemed that there was a 99% chance that a firmware update would not allow you to restore a backup of the router config on the updated device!
That happened a couple times, spent days getting everything set up only to find out the firmware update refused to load a config made with an older version. F that. Never used those routers again.
Used to live in a 2 story house built in the 1900’s. It had plaster & lath walls. I ended up with 4 AP’s scattered about before we had decent WiFi coverage.
If something looks cool and flashy and has tons of “extra functions” I stay the fuck away from it because I know the target demographic and I know it’s going to be shit in surprising ways.