[hnov]

Some of the WireCutter’s picks were fairly terrible, which makes sense: testing diverse categories of products is too expensive for affiliate links to cover. I’ve gifted dashcams on their recommendation that shot beautiful QHD but had MTBF measured in single digit months. The TP-Link C7 Archer was kind of a turd and within a stone’s throw of a decent router price-wise.

[m0lecules]

To be fair, MTBF is not something you can measure in a reasonable time for these kinds of review sites. Far better for this kind of thing is niche-specific youtube channels.

But in any case, what you're asking for here is a prediction of your future satisfaction with a product. It's a non-trivial problem even for the most innocuous purchases.

Will I like Lysol or Clorox wipes more? Who knows, and the reviews aren't going to beat first-hand experience in any circumstances.

[seanp2k2]

I’ve written extensively about this recently, but these days with $300+ “gaming” routers using crappy sweatshop software on whatever Atheros router SoC, many users would be much better served with legit SMB routing / switching / wifi systems that are available for around the same price.

[disgruntledphd2]

I've always found anything tagged as "gaming" to be lower quality and more expensive than the business machines.

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This message sent from a Thinkpad business machine that I use for gaming (and ML, theoretically).

[bobthepanda]

I mean this is a known thing in general; the best kitchen supply stuff you can buy is often stuff intended for commercial use, because it quite literally goes through the wringer with near-constant usage over long periods of time.

The problem is finding a place that sells commercial things to individual buyers. That, and sometimes what a commercial kitchen needs is vastly oversized for a regular house; you're probably going to set off your residential fire alarm very often with a massive commercial range designed for woks, for example, unless you also upgrade the ventilation, etc.

[bentcorner]

I switched to Unifi access points and a wired router and switch and am much happier with the result.

The consolidation of router, switch and access point means you can't upgrade individual parts. It's the modern equivalent of the TV-VCR combo and most consumers don't realize they actually can be separated.

[kayodelycaon]

I didn’t know what good Wifi until I switched to using some TP-Link Omada equipment.

If you run your own controller, you can set up a small network (router, PoE switch, and AP) for less than $300. Hardware controller is ~$90. A controller isn’t strictly necessary, but I don’t recommend doing a standalone setup.

Downside? It’s business class equipment and you need some idea what you’re doing. It’s not plug-n-play. Also, it’s layer 2 only. If you want mDNS across vlans, you’ll need to run a reflector. (Not difficult. It’s built into avahi.)

[sersi]

I'd love to read what you've written. So far, my research into commercial Access points hasn't really been that fruitful. I refuse any cloud based management interface. For the router, I use mikrotik which has been great but I returned the access points from them that I tried. In the end, my access points are Asus home routers because they were the best I found.

[Sunspark]

The C7 is a good router if you put OpenWRT on it.

[macintux]

> The TP-Link C7 Archer was kind of a turd and within a stone’s throw of a decent router price-wise.

Can attest. I finally ditched mine, got tired of it falling over multiple times each week.

[tzs]

I've got the A7, which I believe is the same thing except it has some sort of ability to enable Alexa control for something or other.

Mine has worked great. The only issues I've seen are (1) the traffic stats don't count IPv6 traffic, and (2) there is something odd that sometimes goes on when a connection ends that can result in packets from the LAN side showing up on the WAN side without the LAN-side IP address being replaced with the WAN-side IP address.

The first is a bit of annoyance, and the second as far as I saw didn't actually cause any problems.

[michaelmrose]

Maybe you got a lemon I've been using mine for a while now. Not as nice as my old one with customer firmware but still consistent.

[sumoboy]

wirecutter's picks are definitely bad, more like products to avoid.