Top critical review
2.0 out of 5 starsPoor customer support
Reviewed in Canada on July 14, 2023
The good:
- Work as intended and speeds are decent
- Basic routing, good for someone who has computers, cell phones, in a house with no tech / not too much intelligent devices / iot
- Beautiful if it fits your style.
- Easy to install with a phone.
The bad:
- Crashes. I think some features were causing it, was it fixed by a FW update or was it me disabling all the bling bling? They dont seem to crash a lot now but I may not have super-speed-roaming or beamforming and stuff.
- I dont fully trust them yet, they seem to freeze-unfreeze from time to time without warning... just big loading times, lag spikes, but no warning in the logs whatsoever and no LEDs changing color...
- BAD interface. It can ONLY be configured with a phone, NOT a computer (what the heft!?!). Makes it hard to integrate in a mid-teched house as a router. You need something stronger. Still good as APs.
- Limited support when crashing. As mentioned, no logs, no alert, just a red blinky that comes and goes. Weird.
- Takes quite some time to boot up compared to other devices. Makes me wonder if it could cause problems with IP reservation / auto-assignation of IPs / conflicts when rebooting the whole mesh.
- I feel the hardware is not future-proof or intended to be used as a growing router solution. The CPU shows 100% whenever you ask it to do anything other than idle... like its meant to allow network traffic pass through, but not much else.
All in all, I will keep them as wifi APs, they might be very strong with a good beefy router, but the lack of configurability will send them out the door sooner than expected.
I'm out of return time and was hoping that the lack of web UI was my browser not supporting something but with further research, it seems like TP Link is super obnoxious about it and says "It was not INTENDED to have a web UI" ... I mean ffs who says that to dozens of asking customers for a standard feature in their router / AP! Surely I will do better research next time before buying from TP Link.
If only I knew this product was a downgrade from my previous APs, I would have kept the other ones...