Top critical review
1.0 out of 5 starsIt comes with a "warranty"
Reviewed in the United States on April 6, 2022
I've owned many routers before, back to when 11Mbps was state of the art wifi and adding a password was something recommended but not enabled by default (RIP the days of free wifi in your apartment complex), and would install third party firmware on my own routers just to that I could tinker with them more than you usually can. I say this to suggest that I am not a complete imbecile when it comes to how a router functions.
It was clear that this was simply a dud, the wifi drops constantly for many devices in the house, though the wired works perfectly fine, and changing relevant wireless settings like strength, preferred channels, and bandwidth wasn't doing anything to help. While I wasn't happy with it, I understood that sometimes you get a bad one. That's why I'm giving this 3 stars for wifi signal even though mine barely worked, because I don't think the one I got was representative of what is probably usually a pretty good router and I can only assume it's at least 3 stars when yours isn't broken.
Unfortunately, by the time I had connected this router in a new house and had cable lines installed to actually make use of it, anything I could have done through Amazon was expired. Manufacturer's warranty it is. You know where this is going. They call it a warranty, but it's actually some Indiana Jones hallway full of increasingly lethal traps as you progress: spike pits, arrow traps, flaming skeletons, rolling boulders - you name it. You get your replacement if you survive. I, myself, ended up as a charred red paste on the floor.
If you need to exercise your warranty with TP-Link, expect to be dragged around for longer than the cost of the router is worth. I have been through 3 live chats, factory reset the router 3 times, changed wireless bands and bandwidth, encryption types, individual 2.4GHz/5Ghz network configurations, and all manner of other settings things that should not need to be changed for the most basic operation of the router. I was then passed over to email (who were on holiday).
When they got back to me, it was like none of that from before had happened. I was magically teleported to the beginning of the hallway of death even though I had just cleared the arrow traps. They wanted me to answer things that had already been answered, but this time they additionally wanted me to install TeamViewer - a remote desktop manager - and schedule an appointment so that they could look at the settings themselves - through my computer - because they don't trust that I have the 10 braincells required to hold the reset button down and put the router back (again) into the default state.
I honestly don't know what they expected to find: "Yep, this sure is the default settings that we programmed the router to have." Maybe they would then do some Hollywood hackerman sequence, typing out random numbers in a secret admin console, reprogram the whole thing right in front of me, and ask me to prick my blood into one of the ethernet ports so that they could genetically match its configuration. Then, my router would suddenly work like it was supposed to when it first arrived on my doorstep. I'll never know.
Sorry, but no, I have done everything you walked me through even though much of it was silly. I understood that some people aren't great with technology and that you have to eliminate the obvious things first. I have never owned a router that required tech support to remotely connect to my computer to function. Maybe it's because I haven't owned a TP-Link router before. I won't make that mistake again.
For what it's worth, I don't blame the people I talked to. I can only imagine they are juggling 10+ different people at any moment around who have issues with 100+ possible products and trying their best with the guidelines they are given.