Top critical review
1.0 out of 5 starsA trash product that has NEVER worked correctly for me!
Reviewed in the United States on February 15, 2024
I am *STILL* working with TP-Link support, who is on like a 1 month vacation for Chinese new year or something.... since AUGUST 2023, right after I bought it. My first one worked for about 3 days, then suddenly I had MASSIVE latency across all bands. Support had me try a bunch of band stuff, I guess to prove to them this does not work, including beta firmware, and they finally sent me a replacement. The replacement fixed the high latency issues, but the device *STILL* drops all wireless devices multiple times a day completely randomly. I have even turned off all band except 2.4 and it still drops. The wifi gets the "!" error on the front. No wired devices in my home lose connectivity or drop internet so I know it is this device.
The web GUI does not load most of the time. Just going to the ip of the device will redirect to a FIRST TIME INSTALL tp-link page. 1/10 times if I just try again it will let me back in, but the other 9/10 times I have to reboot just to get to the gui. To reboot I have to open the phone app then reboot through there.
This thing runs pretty hot. You cannot feel it touching the cheap plastic case it is in, but just put your hands over the vents and blow from the bottom, tons of heat comes out. I actually have two USB powered fans sitting under this thing just to cool it, and of course their software provides no way to SEE the temperatures, something even Linksys APs did back in the 90s.
Lastly, this does have 10gig uplinks, which I have to have, but for no known reason they decided to use some cheap SoC nic that does not support jumbo frames! So this cannot be used in any enterprise or business environment, or really as any kind of external storage either. Also that nic gets no where close to 10gig, it hardly can push 2.5g in my tests on both the units I have had.
I have been working with support so long now, that I do not even have the option of TRYING to return this to Amazon, and I can only hope that when the SINGLE guy that does their support (judging by the OoO message I got back) will honor a guarantee and refund me my money so I can go buy a device that actually works, this one is near unusable currently, runs like alpha hardware and software, and for a person who is IT and WFH it makes this device COMPLETELY unusable as you lose all work and connectivity when it decides to just drop everything.
Avoid at all costs, this needs another year or two in the oven, this is not even ready for beta testing IMO.