Top critical review
1.0 out of 5 starsStopped working after two months
Reviewed in the United States on January 15, 2024
First of all, about my rating of the product: Had the unit I received not been defective, I would have rated this 5 stars (see the original review below). But after so much trouble it has caused me, I couldn't rate it higher than one star. It does not mean that I disagree with others who have given this product a higher rating. Every user experience is just a data point. I contribute my data point truthfully.
If the replacement router remains reliable for at least a year or two, I'll adjust the ratings accordingly. That's a bit long time to test, I know. I normally wouldn't wait that long to give credit to a product, but after having a defective product, the burden of proof has shifted.
DEFECTIVE PRODUCT
The product worked well initially but became completely unusable after two months. Devices could not stay connected. They get disconnected frequently, sometimes even within minutes of reconnection. When disconnected, devices could not auto-reconnect, and manual reconnection became unpredictable.
It happened all of a sudden with all devices. Restarting and even resetting could not fix the problem.
I am very experienced with routers. I know the problem had nothing to do with configurations and devices. The router broke on its own. I didn't do anything to the router before it broke. Not even a reconfiguration. Even if some reconfiguration caused it, factory resetting would have solved the problem. But it did not. I don't think it's the firmware problem, either. I updated it to the latest firmware immediately when I got the router. The router worked for two months with the latest firmware before all this happened.
I have used many routers in the past. There have been other problems, but I have never had a router that suddenly stopped working, never even after years of use. But the TP-Link did it within two months—just long enough to pass the Amazon return period.
Too bad because it worked well when it did.
REPLACEMENT
I received a replacement, which worked immediately once set up, proving that the previous unit was indeed defective.
But I will have to wait to see if the replacement unit can remain stable. After all, the previous unit worked perfectly for two months before it suddenly broke.
The replacement is not a new unit but a "refurbished unit". That doesn't give you a lot of confidence. Many of these routers are returned because they have become unstable, not because they simply died. I have serious doubts that the refurbishing process can truly diagnose all of the stability issues. They will be able to diagnose and fix apparent problems, but unlikely all of them, especially stability problems.
As a result, I just don't feel very good about the whole thing. I hope I got a good sample, but to be honest, I don't have much confidence. If this one also has problems, I'm not going to get another replacement. I will certainly switch to a different router.
THE REPLACEMENT PROCESS
The replacement process was at least 10 times harder than Amazon's return. This is an objective statement because I measure the processes by the time and effort required to get replacement authorization and shipped. With Amazon, a return would take just a few minutes to get both authorization and a free shipping label. With TP-Link, the process took me at least an hour (though it felt much longer than that).
First, I had to argue with customer service to convince them that the device needed to be replaced. Then, I had to open an account with them, go through a complicated process to register the product, initiate a replacement process, monitor individual steps, and so on. You will not be able to do it unless you are determined and patient enough to read many instructions and navigate through many things to decide what to do and what not to do.
In the end, I also had to pay for shipping, which was almost $20, with the slowest option. And they don't ship the replacement until they receive the old one.
Fortunately, I had another router that I could use temporarily. But what if I didn't?
To TP-Link's credit, the replacement was shipped only two days after they received the defective router. Also, because it was shipped from a warehouse very close to me, it arrived after an additional two days. So, the total turnaround time was less than one week, much shorter than I had expected.
Also, to be fair, I don't think TP-Link's product return process is particularly bad compared to other manufacturers. Returning a product is inherently difficult for both the manufacturer and the consumer. To prevent consumer fraud, the manufacturer has to have some degree of verification and prevention. Amazon made its return super simple because it forces manufacturers to accept returns with essentially no condition imposed and to offer free two-way shipping. No manufacturer can afford this kind of product return service for a long time. Amazon also has extremely efficient return address label printing and drop-off services, taking advantage of its vast platform and network, which individual manufacturers don't have.
For the manufacturers, the only way to avoid this problem is to make the product more reliable.
The following is the ORIGINAL REVIEW (which was written before the problems described above, and you can see it was positive):
THE ORIGINAL REVIEW
I installed this only a few days ago, so it is too early to judge its stability. But I can comment on some other things.
This router replaced a five-year-old NETGEAR Nighthawk Pro Gaming XR500 Wi-Fi router and instantly solved all the problems we had with the old router. Since we had the Netgear, we always experienced random delays in receiving mobile text messages under the Wi-Fi setting. Phone calls through Wi-Fi calling were also unreliable. But we couldn't determine whether it was the router or the mobile carrier and hence did not consider changing the router until recently.
Upon installing the TP-Link AX5400, it became clear that the old router was causing problems with Wi-Fi text messaging and calling. So far, everything seems to work perfectly with this new router.
The signal strength and coverage also seem better, although we had no issues with the Netgear either.
It took just several minutes to set up the new router. The only part that felt "difficult" was choosing a new admin password that felt secure.
By the way, the price of this new router is less than half of what we paid for the Netgear five years ago.