Comment by fweespeech | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fweespeech | Hacker News Reader

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> routers have always a pain to configure

Eh? You must buy some shitty routers, no offense.

Compared to the rest of the market, paying $200 for a router isn't competitive. It just is not worth it given Google's "eh-we-will-do-it-and-stop-if-people-complain/sue" mindset.

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To Melvin, since I'm submitting to fast:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B013ALA9LA?ref=spks_0_0_2170510902&...

> OnHub Wireless Router from Google and TP-LINK > by TP-LINK

1) You complain about the quality of TP-LINK products and think the solution is....another TP-LINK product, likely measured in the same way.

2) Honestly, I cannot think of a consumer AP that would actually perform to your expectations [apartment complex with 30+ competitors, saturating all the channels] that would be priced at $300, let alone $200. I can tell you right now, this Google AP won't do it either. Its "up to 1900mbps" for a reason. Trust me. Buying this won't be a magical solution to your problems if you real world gigabit speeds.

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To the folks complaining about "magical routers":

A) Buy something from Ubiquiti Networks.

B) Buy something you can flash with WRT firmware.

In both cases, as long as you understand the hardware specs, you'll get something better than the norm. In Ubiquiti's case, I'm 99% sure it will outperform a Google branded TP-Link AP unless Google is heavily subsidizing and QAing everything.

I have a 1 Gbps fiber connection at my apartment. I spent a good hour doing research and finally bought this http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00BUSDVBQ. It had 4.5 stars at the time and was the highest rated router that Amazon carried. I bought it, plugged it in and ran speedtest on it. Max speed I could get was 250mb/s. Not bad but not the gb/s that was getting advertised. Additional, over time, it would always slow down to 10-50mb/s. I called TP-Link and they said this was likely the best it'll do and the advertised speeds are in an interference free lab environment.

If OnHub fixes that second problem as they claim to, that would be more than enough reason for me to spend the $200. If they can get higher than 250mb/s speed by optimizing around the congestion, $200 will be well worth the spend.

I was in the same situation as you. Same Router too.

I could actually get close to 1 Gbps with the stock firmware. But it was unstable, requiring a reset every other day. I used an open source firmware, but it didn't contain the NAT offload module, so I would not be able to get over 200-250 Mbps. (This was is all wired, not wireless).

Since I had a wifi access point, I ended up switching to an Ubiquity Edgemax router and haven't had any problems since.

Not really a fan of TP-Link.

Here's the thing about TP-Link: They're a "good enough" manufactur. Meaning if you care about something, don't buy a TP-Link, but if you don't care that much and just need it to basically work "good enough" (e.g. WiFi for your mom's house) then they're fine.

I got a cheap TP-Link repeater. It works fine, nothing special, no bells or whistles. But for the price it was a good buy.

TP-Link are hardly a manufacturer of "good enough" products. Their $100 Archer C7 router is the top recommendation on TheWirecutter for over a year.[0] Their $75 Archer C5 is also the top rated AC1200 router in every single category on SmallNetBuilder.[1] It beats out more expensive models from all the bigger name manufacturers.

[0] http://thewirecutter.com/reviews/best-wi-fi-router/

[1] http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/tools/rankers/router/result/1...

I've got the same router and I'm getting close to 900Mbps. Maybe your client device doesn't support 5Ghz?

I'm very happy considering the price and openwrt support.

Wifi or ethernet? My client device is the latest MacBook Pro. It supports 5Ghz.

So what's your magical router? Does it have options actually make sense? And a help that is, like, helpful?

I'm talking about things such as "Enable XPRESS whatever". Help: "Turns XPRESS whatever on or off". And then you find out that no matter what the feature was supposed to do, theoretically, in practice it makes the router slow and unstable. Or, at worst, crashes it. No brand is immune. Many (non-enterprise) routers will advertise QoS features, but you find that you are better off without them.

That goes for almost all brands that are not classed as "Enterprise" - and even some that are.

Have you ever tried an AVM Router? Amazing things, several of their Fritz!Box lineup are actually better specs-wise than this Google router (and don’t come from a company with rather questionable update and privacy record)

Have you tried running either a *wrt variant, or, if you don't like poking firmware, any of Ubiquiti's offerings?

How do DrayTek products rank these days? When I was on ADSL they were excellent, and their UK-tuned firmware outperformed Linksys & Netgear.

Now I'm on fibre I'm using the Draytek purely as an access point, and BT's modem to connect. The Draytek'll need replacing soon.

I only recommend what I've used personally. :/

DrayTek sucks as a router, those things need to be rebooted all the time. Use an EdgeRouter.

No experience with Draytek's routers, but I've been happy with their ADSL/VDSL modems (Vigor 120/130). They have some really nice features, like PPPoA -> PPPoE passthrough.

We're using a few of their modems in bridge mode and then everything works fine. It's just the routing they can't do.

> Trust me.

I don't trust people who say "Trust me." :)

I'm sure. No one ever believes me until I've been paid to fix it. I'm used to it.

It's less about your skills, and more about your presentation. "Honestly" and "Trust me" smack of salesmanship. It's a weird effect. Engineers try to be more persuasive by picking up, intentionally or not, vocabulary used for persuasion. Unfortunately, there is a lot of nuance that's hard to control.

Tighten up your writing, and perhaps speech, so you simply state the facts as you see them. This router will meet your needs because it has these 3 features. 1,2,3. It's much harder to argue with flat statements of fact as opposed to the salesmanship trick of, i would lie to most people but i like you so i'm going to tell you a secret.

Or, you know, don't. If it's not a problem for you don't waste time on it, but that's the underlying effect.

Thanks for the advice.

I think the underlying problem is my incentive is for people to disbelieve me the first time I tell them something. I don't really care if they believe me since after I am proven right I get more to fix the problem. [e.g. The last time, I got ~$6k] :/

So I'm not really motivated to fix it, y'know?

I probably should fix it since I'd be a better person for it but my financial incentive isn't aligned with fixing it.

My point: you're a random stranger saying to another random stranger "trust me" without justifying your request to trust you. Why should I trust you?

Your reply: After I've convinced them that I know enough to fix the problem (by either demonstrating my expertise/qualifications/experience or getting someone else to vouch for me), they believe me.

Well duh! If you demonstrate why they should trust you, they'll trust you. They won't just randomly pay you money to fix shit if they don't trust you.

Given I suggested a free solution it doesn't really require much trust.

But hey, go keep trusting the people who already screwed you.

You're going off the deep end now.

I'm uncertain how a factual statement is going off the deep end but okay.

1) You want to fix a shitty TP-Link product with another TP-Link product.

2) How is that not that?

Trustworthy people don't need to tell others to trust them.

I've never had problems with my Router. I do however have problems with Google ChromeCast vanishing from other devices -- which according to Google is a problem with the router (although for me the problem mostly occurs when the ChromeCast decides to use the same WiFi channel for its internal WLAN as the WiFi it's registered on).

I also have occasional problems with Linux devices being picky and flaky -- sometimes not connecting at all (repeating the "connecting..." phase ad nauseam) and sometimes just dropping the connection until I restart the device.

I find it dubious that these problems would be fixed by a Google branded router.

I have a Ubiquiti AC access point at home and the only thing I could see the OnHub doing better is the auto-sensing other networks and working around them. I'm not sure how that would work yet since changing channels would kick everyone off wifi for a second but the Ubiquiti "auto" channel is only changed/detected at boot (probably for the reason I just mentioned).

Really? I paid more for that for my last one. ASUS RT-AC68U when it just came out...

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