Looking to get better Wi-Fi

[ShiBDiB]

Nothing wrong with TP-Link - a lot of people give them shit for being cheap but their equipment works just as well, or even better than, bigger-name brands like Linksys. I'm currently using their AXE 5400 router in the exact same setup as you intend, and very happy with it. Honestly the only pain is having to figure out where the option to disable Wi-Fi resides in your ISP router's probably terrible interface...

TPLink is fine if you buy a newer model. They're notorious for dropping support for "old" models very quickly.

Your money would be better spent on having them move your modem out of the basement and somewhere more centrally located. Doesn't matter what router you have, the more physical barriers the worse your wifi (not to mention the basement ceiling probably has more utilities and other things to interfere more than your typical ceiling).

 

[TheLostSwede]

TPLink is fine if you buy a newer model. They're notorious for dropping support for "old" models very quickly.

But that's the problem, how do you know you're getting a new model, when they have five different revisions for their most popular models just so they get away with not supporting the older ones? I would never use a TP-Link product as a main router, running their firmware. As I wrote earlier in this thread, decent hardware, crap software support.

Another reason not to get tp-link hardware, they spam you in their apps.

 

[trparky]

So, I installed my RT-AX5400 last night and holy shit, Wi-Fi performance is nothing short of amazing. In areas of the house where Wi-Fi was shitty before I can now pull down 600 Mbps and about 300 Mbps up on a Internet speed test (500/500 is my service speed). That's amazing. And that's without moving where the router was.

Oh, and the feature set is amazing as well. Bandwidth monitoring, traffic analyzing, etc. It's amazing.

 

[P4-630]

I never had serious issues getting my promised speeds by Wifi with a router from my ISP, so I guess they aren't giving out the worst here...

 

[trparky]

I never had serious issues getting my promised speeds by Wifi with a router from my ISP, so I guess they aren't giving out the worst here...

Internal antennas, what do you want? If AT&T has to give you one of these for the service to even work, you can pretty much bet that it's capable of doing the bare minimum. The thing is definitely not for power users like me or anyone that hangs out on forums like this one.

 

[P4-630]

Internal antennas, what do you want?

Mine did 800mbps+ wireless when I stil had 1Gbps.
Currently I'm back to 200/30 which I get 202/30 wireless.

Router with internal antennas here...

So your ISP gave you a very shitty one then ok...

 

[bonehead123]

Nothing wrong with TP-Link - a lot of people give them shit for being cheap but their equipment works just as well, or even better than, bigger-name brands like Linksys

Well, I have to disagree with this whole statement, based on my previous experiences with every one (9) of toilet paper's routers I have tried over the years, from bottom end to top end....

Complete & utter shit IMHO, everything from day 1 DOA's to fatal hardware crash & burns after a month or 2 of use, to software/firmware bugs, bloats, and unrecoverable bricking... and guess what... their so-called "customer service" suks wallah too

I've only ever been able to get 1 of their bad ones replaced via an RMA, and that process was frighteningly complicated & redundant, requiring multiple phone calls, emails and letters from my attorney... neva again !

I've always had great luck with Netgear, Belkin and Ubiquiti, which is what I currently use in various set-ups for the family & some of my pc-build clients...

And yea, I know some people are not fans of these 3 brands, for various reasons, but OTOH, virtually all brands have their individual issues here & there

But anyways, getting good WiFi requires:

A) Strong, clean service from your ISP & electric company
B) Good, up to date equipment on all fronts, from the modem & router to the device's WiFi card/antennae etc
C) Minimal interference and barriers to strong signal transmission, like concrete slabs, internal wiring, other RF signals etc between the router & your devices

If you can't/wont/are not able & willing to address/fix these 3 things, you can ramble on all you want about all the various other factors, and it won't matter one bit

 

[TheLostSwede]

Mine did 800mbps+ wireless when I stil had 1Gbps.
Currently I'm back to 200/30 which I get 202/30 wireless.

Router with internal antennas here...

So your ISP gave you a very shitty one then ok...

You can still test at full speed if you install iPerf3 on your PC and laptop, or something like magic iPerf on your phone.

 

[Shou Miko]

@TheLostSwede I respect everything you say and agree with you on a lot of things, I have been running TP-Link Deco M5 AP's on several locations and I believe they was introduced to the public back in 2017 and I still get firmware updates on the Deco app for them so it's not all their products that gets scrapped after a few updates

The last update I was like November or December last year so that's 6 years not bad if I might say so

 

[TheLostSwede]

@TheLostSwede I respect everything you say and agree with you on a lot of things, I have been running TP-Link Deco M5 AP's on several locations and I believe they was introduced to the public back in 2017 and I still get firmware updates on the Deco app for them so it's not all their products that gets scrapped after a few updates

The last update I was like November or December last year so that's 6 years not bad if I might say so

Fair enough, I have just checked their standard routers and not their mesh products.

My most recent TP-Link wireless product purchase was the RE450 range extender and I got a version 1.0 which they dropped support for in 2017.

I was surprised to see the product in Costco the other week and it turns out they're not on version 4.8, which alongside version 4.6 and 4.0 had its last update in April this year, whereas version 2.0 was killed off in December 2021.

I just find it hard trusting a company like this, as it's technically the same product from the outside. Version 1 and 2 has the same Qualcomm hardware, no idea what they put in version 4.x, but they appear to share the same hardware as they all have the same last firmware info.
However, I would hazard a guess that they're using the same hardware as in the newer RE550 (3x3) and RE650 (4x4) models which are MTK based.

That said, it's not as critical to have an up to date firmware on something that isn't directly connected to the internet, but at least in my specific case, the firmware was flaky and it needed to be rebooted every so often, so in the end I installed OpenWRT on it and after that it was actually more stable until I managed to brick it when updating to a more recent build of OpenWRT.

Also, TP-Link is by no means unique in doing things like this, but considering you can buy their products in almost any electronics shop across the globe, you'd think they offered a bit better support rather than playing these types of games. Even so, I would rather buy TP-Link than say an Acer router, as Acer doesn't even provide full specs on the product page of their routers...