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Forum Discussion
What is your impression of hardware failure rate?
I'm thinking of ordering a wifi router from the US, to where I live in south east asia, because the only routers on sale here are old and or over priced low to mid tier devices. I'd like to avoid any...
the actual failure rate is quite good as far as reports go , there are some gonfig and teething issue and compatibility issues with some manufactures devices but they seem to be getting ironed out with newer fw
i have both the orbi rbr50 with 2 sats and i also have the synology rt2600ac
they really achieve different things , the orbi give whole home wifi , the synology give a decent gui and feature set
the perfect world you would run the synology as a router only and the orbi in ap mode
the trendnet 813 can be run as a router only and disable its wifi and run the orbi system in ap mode , just depends on how good the trendnet gui and feature set is
with regard to the synology , its a pretty good product but its wifi is no better that any other wave 1 1900ac router ( its actually 1733M but i would bet you dont have the adapters to use it ) , its gui has a pretty good featureset but promises of more apps has not yet become available , its also pretty dam expensive for what it is
if you have the money and want a big honking all in one router look at something like the netgear r8500 ( which i also have ) its got all the bells and whistles you could ever want , the r9000 is total overkill that half of it you couldnt use anyway plus its still only 1733M wifi
Thanks for the input peteytesting. It's great to read that your experience of the Orbi has been positive.
I'd come to suspect that most of the complaints about most routers "just stopped working" or "dead on arrival" were down to misconfgiuration or simply requiring a reset and configuration from scratch. Every router I've ever owned has got itself so messsed up or started acting oddly and needed to be reset at some point.
I oreded with B&H Photo in the end; their shipping costs are reasonable but do add $50 to the cost. Due to the shipping I wanted to get something mid tier or better, however, I decided I wouldn't see much benefit from the AC5000 routers and I wasn't sure my house was big enough to require a mesh system; I thought a big powerful router would probably give acceptable coverage down to the opposite corner of the house. I also get the impression that we are only seeing the beginning of a revolution in wifi and that eventually most wifi routers will be some form of a mesh but I don't think the current offerings are yet mature. With all this in mind, the pull of a $30 discount I choose a TP-Link C3150, with the discount it was $70 less than the very similar but better respected Asus AC3100.
It's working out very well so far. It has LACP link aggregation which is working well with my Qnap NAS and I'm seeing stable transfer speeds on the top floor of my house (were the router is positioned) of 40+ MB/s with my 2014 Macbook Pro, that's more that twice what I saw on the Trendnet. Smart connect is working nicely too so now I only need one SSID (for 2.4GHz and 5GHz) and I've been able to ditch the wifi extender I used before (actually, it worked quite well but it's good to simplify.) The only annoyance I've had is that it won't let me put OpenVPN on port 443 (which I've read sometimes help sneek connections out of corporate networks, although I don't seem to need that where I work.) I've also found I need to use a laptop cooler, we are almost on the Equator and the room it's in gets pretty warm when the aircon is off; not very scientific I know but without the cooler the plastic cover got almost uncomfortably hot to touch.
Anyway, thanks for letting my know about your thoughts on the Orbi. Maybe I'll join the netgear mesh community next generation :smileyhappy: