I was in conversation with their customer service on the phone and it disconnected. Frustrated, cause it meant I had to call them back and there was no guarantee that I would get the same agent again, I gave up calling them. However, in 5 minutes, I got a call back from them - the same agent called me back and did manage to resolve my issue.
This was in India and prior to that, such service was unheard of (and not many still have that even today).
The device did not give me much trouble so I don't completely agree with the above.
I worked at Meraki, and institutionally we were deathly scared of dealing with that market; we were perfectly happy to stay in the enterprise market, where buyers were actually willing to pay for quality.
I don't know if they bought someone who knew what they were doing with power strips or what, but .... i'm still using them.
https://www.amazon.com/Belkin-12-Outlet-Protector-Protection...
My theory is that they are good because electrical safety is something that is actually regulated. UL and CE certification to sell as a consumer device. Whereas there is no penalty or regulation for shitty routers with shit firmware.
Reminder:
> CE marking does not provide any specific information to the consumer. It is not a quality assurance declaration, it does not show evidence of third-party testing, and it should not be confused with any independent certification mark of the type issued by international or European notified test bodies.
My main complaint with Belkin is that you don't have that option.
Their core competency is something innocuous like mousepads and power strips. Then they advance into more delicate and complicated electronics and the wheels fall off the wagon.
It reminds me of the early and mid-1980's when office supply companies decided that they should branch out from selling paper to making floppy disks. They were cheap, especially in bulk, but over time they had a much higher failure rate.
Eventually the only brands you could count on to work properly were BASF, 3M, Elephant Memory Systems, and IBM. (And probably a couple of others)
Other dongles for example randomly lost one of the color channels, had noisy output, occasionally flickered black or didn't work when waking up from sleep.
D-Link gear is hot garbage.
The OS on the ubnt edgerouter series is a fork of vyatta, which is Debian based.
Also for people who know what they are doing, a mikrotik rb3011 would be a good choice.
The recommendation for the rb3011; or winbox and routerOS in general?
While it is not perfect. I do not know of other vendors with open docs like the mikrotik wiki[0].
With winbox, wiki, and not to bad cli. I feel it a good starting point for non network engineers. Better then horrible web interface or arcane cli interface.
Any recommendations for someone that want to learn to know what they are doing?
They also have a really good command line interface - which is lucky, because the biggest downside with the Ubiquitis is that some (generally more obscure and advanced) features can't be configured through the web UI.
https://openwrt.org/toh/views/toh_available_864
I personally had good experiences with TP-Link Archer C7 and GL Networks mini-routers.
The N generation like the RT-N12 is dirt cheap now. I deploy them in client offices and they have uptime measured in years.
It's not WiFi Ac and I don't care. It stays stable, has guest WiFi networks, and usable firmware.
In the ski lodge, OpenWRT and a $20 TP-Link have uptime measured in years by now. OpenWRT is awesome.
We also used the previous version for older macbooks with thunderbolt and never had a problem with them.
"prosummer" brands
After a brief romance with VyOS and RPi based APs, Ubiquiti came along and swept me off my feet
Currently using their gear throughout a 300-ish person office. Easy to setup, no issues that weren’t our fault in the first place.
Great kit for startup and growing type situations
We use the Ubiquity Security Gateway Pro and have for over a year now issues with it's WAN Fallback. In the beginning it simply wouldn't Fallback at all, after lot's of Customer Service and three patches it actually did it's thing, but since then whenever the fallback happened our whole connection got instable until the USG is restarted. Once we even had issues because the USG thought WAN was down because it couldn't reach Ubiquity's Ping site (It was down) and so the connection started flip-flopping between two stable connections.
Besides that the Ubiquity Needle is now firmly stuck into the arm of our Admins and all the Network Gear we buy is from Ubiquity.
Most needed reboots as they’d stop working from time to time, many had flaxy Wifi or sudden long network lags for no reason, and the MicroTik even bricked itself requiring a reflash of the firmware.
Things might be different when it comes to enterprise gear.
I mean I was purposefully stress testing and can be a heavy user. Maybe it works fine for grandma doing some email and Facebook on an iPad
After great feels using it at work, setup Ubiquiti kit at home two years ago and only rebooted it when I decided to move the APs to improve signal coverage on the far end of our house.
For $100-ish an AP these days (my home units are the UniFi AP-AC Long Range on Amazon), I don’t see any reason to buy anything else
Some of them obey the Law of Plastic Box: a device in a plastic box does one thing but not more than that. A Huawei router is OK if I just do routing, no WLAN, and put a TP-Link box as a WLAN beside it. Etc.
The only exceptions I have had in consumer-priced equipment is Ubiquity, which is great, and a small Finnish company called Telewell (which make cheap plastic things in China but strangely has never failed for me). The UI with Telewell is still the typical consumer-grade Web UI.
Wondering if things are better with newer hardware.
It became rather untenable once that office hit ~30 people.
There were external factors that had us accepting defeat. Picked up some used Ruckus gear on the cheap, which helped but wasn’t that nice to use
If raspberry Pi's CPU performance is absolutely necessary, use an Ethernet cable with WR810N.