16 ms·

For those who are curious, there's a bunch of reasons that contribute to why consumer wifi routers sucks ass: 1. Wifi routers are very complicated. You need sm

For those who are curious, there's a bunch of reasons that contribute to why consumer wifi routers sucks ass: 1. Wifi routers are very complicated. You need smart people at all levels of the stack to build a modern wifi router. You need people who know 802.1ac like the back side of their hand, people who know how to set up and deploy linux environments, embedded engineers for debugging OEM driver issues, networking gurus for handling the voodoo in levels 2-4 of the OSI stack, application people for rolling the user interface, cloud people for cloud support. Normally this isn't a big deal, if it wasnt for the next point 2. The profit margins on consumer routers are complete trash. Even if you're one of the big boys with double digit market share, you're going to have a very hard time keeping a decent engineering team staffed and your marketing team staffed at the same time while still breaking even. 3. Consumer router sales are SKU driven. There are dozens of price and performance points you have to hit to meet the demands of the consumer market. You cannot make be profitable with less than 10 actively selling SKUs. Every time you release a new SKU, it's a new opportunity for marketing to try to sell the device to brick and mortar stores that they're trying to expand into. If you aren't releasing 5-6 SKUs each year, you're going to have a very hard time keeping your router on store shelves. 4. Since sales are SKU driven and your engineering team is probably under funded, you have the exciting problem of maintenance releases. If your company has 50 supported SKUs and you find a non-driver issue in one of them, the chances are that it affects 10 other SKUs as well, if not all of your other SKUs. Pushing that maintenance firmware to 50 SKUs could easily take 6 months of combined QA or Firmware development time. As far as your marketing department is concerned, all that time you spend on maintenance releases is time that isn't spent on making new SKUs with exciting new features. tldr: get a business class wifi router

shmerl 10y ago
For home usage, high end consumer routers with free firmware work just fine (something like Linksys WRT1900ACS with DD-WRT / OpenWRT).
- zippergz 10y ago
  Admittedly I haven't tried the newest models, but my experience with Linksys hardware and either ddwrt or tomato was pretty bad. Run for a couple of days and then require a power cycle. Seemed like a hardware issue.
  - shmerl 10y ago
    WRT1900ACS is pretty good with DD-WRT (uptime can be until next firmware update). Linksys also sell special set of antennas, which improve signal range (costly but can be worth it depending on your situation). I think they target it for network enthusiasts, rather than very wide market, so they put some effort into quality there.
  - GordonS 10y ago
    I've had the same experience with DD-WRT on TPLINK hardware. DD-WRT has great features but always seems to require a reboot every 1-2 days :(
    - semi-extrinsic 10y ago
      Counterpoint: I run dd-wrt on a TPLINK el cheapo something at the office, to connect all the boxen and let me SSH into each of them (port forwarding 19 to 22 on box1, 20 to 22 on box2 etc). It Just Works, never had to reboot it in four years now. (WiFi is off though.)
  - Jaruzel 10y ago
    Likewise. I ended up reverting a couple of my Linksys APs and WRTs back to stock firmware and living with the lack of features...
  - matheweis 10y ago
    I'm running tomato on a WNR3500L/U/v2... uptime is 134 days and I'm pretty sure the last bounce was a power outage. So, ymmv?
  - darryl42 10y ago
    dd-wrt has gotten pretty bad. They don't publish new releases anymore you just pick a daily build from one of the random people who publish builds and hope it doesn't brick your router. Learned this after bricking my router :(
- _RPM 10y ago
  I have the 1200AC it's got a 1.3 mhz proccessor. Not sure if it's as good as the 1900
  - shmerl 10y ago
    WRT1900ACS has 1.6 GHz dual core CPU (Marvell Armada chipset): https://wikidevi.com/wiki/Linksys_WRT1900ACS https://wikidevi.com/wiki/Linksys_WRT1900ACS
valine 10y ago
Are there any specific business class routers you would recommend?
- ggggggggggw 10y ago
  i actually edited my post to include the thing about openwrt/ddwrt. If you need stability, go with a high end consumer router and load OpenWRT/DDWRT on it. OpenWRT and friends are very stable, but don't often take advantage of advanced features like automatic channel selection, traffic prioritization, or beamforming. If you absolutely need features, go with a ubiquiti AP. My only issue with them is their hardware leaves a lot to be desired, and is rarely powerful enough to cover a full home, this isn't necessarily ubiquiti's fault though. Business class APs expect you to set up multiple APs in the office, so their hardware is typically a lot less powerful than what you'd see in a consumer wireless router. A ubiquiti AP will gladly cover your 1 bedroom apartment, but don't expect it to cover your 3 bedroom home
  - js2 10y ago
    I have a pair of AC lites covering 4200 sq feet across 3 floors. One is in the upstairs hallway and the other in the basement ceiling.
  - ajdlinux 10y ago
    I would love to use {Open,DD-}WRT, but it seems there's generally not great support for DSL modems :(
    - mindslight 10y ago
      Use a separate modem and router. If you can disable NAT on your current combo unit then you already have the modem.
    - stordoff 10y ago
      I ended up just keeping my ISP router as is, and putting a DD-WRT router behind it. I suspect the double layer of NAT isn't great, but I've been doing it for years without issue. DD-WRT has been pretty solid for that, even in non-ideal network setups (currently have it connected to the ISP router as a 2.4GHz client, then acting as a 5GHZ AP for my other devices).
MBCook 10y ago
This is why I was happy with my Apple products for years. No matter what kind of third-party thing I'd buy it would end up being a piece of trash after a little while. Apple Airports tended to just keep working for my family. Too bad the new ones are ugly as hell. Oh well, my older model still works. And these days so many people get it through their cable provider (or DSL, whatever) who have a marked interest in not generating support calls means you may get decent equipment.
- ggggggggggw 10y ago
  > And these days so many people get it through their cable provider (or DSL, whatever) who have a marked interest in not generating support calls means you may get decent equipment. You would think that, unfortunately it isn't true. Usually those ISP provided combination routers are completely outsourced - as in their hardware and firmware are both made by a chinese OEM overseas. Believe me when I say there is nothing worse than the firmware on those chinese routers. They'll grab a bunch of open source software, reskin it, plug the chipset's reference driver into the OSS, then do a basic sanity test and ship it. You get what you pay for, and the ISPs want to pay as little as humanly possible. I don't know what they do about the support. I remember one time we brought in an ISP's combination modem/router for performance tests against our device lineup, and it would crash if you ever tried to pull more than 40mbit/s through its ethernet ports.
  - MBCook 10y ago
    That's unfortunate. I never really use the Wi-Fi on my Comcast box so I don't know if it was any good. I've had great experiences with people Google fiber boxes, but that's Google and isn't exactly a mass deployment so…
  - mgkimsal 10y ago
    > You get what you pay for, and the ISPs want to pay as little as humanly possible. More a case of you get what they (the ISP) pays for (or doesn't pay for).
  - halostatue 10y ago
ashitlerferad 10y ago
Or get a sane router: https://omnia.turris.cz/ https://omnia.turris.cz/
- ggggggggggw 10y ago
  The problem with Omnia is that it's a niche product that is very unlikely to ever sell outside of its niche. Also, it's being made by people who haven't made a router before. 99% of the issues you'll ever have with your wifi router are driver issues. Omnia is using OpenWRT for their base, however they'll still have to make the chipset driver work with OpenWRT, and at a reasonable speed. Even if they get the driver working, it's unlikely that the device will be running at speeds comparable to other market competitors. It takes lots of unpleasant driver hacks, custom networking stacks, and prioritization magic to hit the benchmark numbers that Asus, Netgear, and Linksys push out. I'm not saying you should write off the Omnia completely, I just recommend sitting back and waiting for it to be released/benchmarked before purchasing it.
  - matt4711 10y ago
    What about AVM products such as a Fritzbox (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz!Box https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz!Box) ? Primarily a german product but also available internationally (e.g. Australia)
    - fifteenforty 10y ago
      The Fritz!box is the only router I recommend to friends. I've run into few problems with them, except persistent issues with the web interface responsiveness. The only real problem is that they are relatively expensive. It's hard to convince people to spend 4x the amount because it's "better". I think most non-geeks don't realise just how bad their routers are making their web experience.
      - MrBuddyCasino 10y ago
        In my experience, the wifi performance of Fritz! boxen sucks. Is this still the case? I ordered a Netgear Nighthawk R7000 and I'm very happy with it.
xyzzy123 10y ago
My experience is that most consumer routers are actually developed and maintained by teams at companies you've never heard of overseas. This is partly as a response to the engineering challenges you've outlined. Taiwan is a popular choice, due to the combination of proximity to manufacturing in China and an English friendly business culture. Every so often the big brands go shopping to build a new product and they select something that meets their needs from the white-label products available. The product then gets customised for them. What the big brands contribute is industrial design of the case, some qa, packaging, ui styling, a distribution channel and consumer trust in their name. Which leads to funny scenes like watching engineers at a white label do board relayouts and emi retesting because the industrial designer wanted the antennas to sprout out of a different bit of the case. Because it looks more badass that way... This also leads to the phenomenon where say, v4.15 of a router was cool, but 4.16 sucks - because internally its a totally different chipset, with a different os (e.g. vxworks vs Linux). Ref e.g. WRT54... The reason this happens is not because the brand name rewrote anything - they just selected a different white label partner who customised a totally different product to look the same (probably because they promised to deliver cheaper for same SKU). This then gets sold under the old, popular model name.
Joof 10y ago
It's pretty obvious that 2 and 3 are a big problem. I'd pay significantly more for a router that I can guarantee works reliably (cost doesn't seem to make a difference for consumer router reliability); find a way to advertise that and I'll love you forever. Make packet loss and latency on a variety of popular hardware / OS (with default settings) THE key metric.
- semi-extrinsic 10y ago
  Protip: if you are willing to pay more for reliability, buy Ubiquiti (or other enterprise class) hardware. It's actually not that much more expensive, and you get great features like PoE, design/color ment to be invisible, and great handover between multiple APs if you have a large house.
chrisked 10y ago
What business class router do you recommend?
- Jaruzel 10y ago
  Draytek Vigor 2860 range: http://www.draytek.co.uk/products/business/vigor-2860 http://www.draytek.co.uk/products/business/vigor-2860 I finally gave up on consumer routers, and bought one of these instead - the learning curve is steep, but it's overloaded with features and runs brilliantly.
  - lostboys67 10y ago
    My experience using draytek is that the documentation is non existent and the small amount that does exists makes the exotic bits of cisco documentation as clear as day.
    - Jaruzel 10y ago
      Well, yes. It's not easy, I did say that, but once you get past the knowledge hurdle, they are very good bits of kit.
pjc50 10y ago
> Consumer router sales are SKU driven. Why is this? It sounds like having recognition of your model numbers is a bad thing, if you need to keep revving them so much.
- ggggggggggw 10y ago
  People rarely recommend routers by their model number, if they recommend a router, they recommend the brand. It's very hard for marketing guys to call Costco and say "hey, you remember that router we tried to sell you 6 months ago? well we just gave it a firmware update!", and close the sale it's very easy for marketing to call Costco and say "hey we got this fantastic new router you guys might be interested in stocking", and close the sale
captn3m0 10y ago
Is there any specific reason why consumer grade router companies (like D-Link) drop their own OS entirely and shift to a open-source alternative? That should bring down development costs somewhat I'm guessing and force them to make different boards compatible. Not a hardware guy, but I've looked at D-Link firmware code in the past, and it is just utterly shoddy. Just making the hardware and making sure it is compatible with some router-os should be simpler. (Essentially what happens in the mobile/laptop industry with android/windows).
- chadgeidel 10y ago
  Maybe not exactly what you want, but Netgear has a fairly wide range of routers with open source firmware support and have a dedicated site [1] for that. I've had good luck with the previous 2 Netgear routers (WNR3500 and WNDR3700) and will probably buy another one again in the future. [1] https://www.myopenrouter.com/ https://www.myopenrouter.com/
userbinator 10y ago
I think the problem is not with the actual IP routing part, as that is relatively straightforward, but with all the other value-added "features" that get crammed into the same and often underpowered hardware. At the least, a consumer WiFi router will contain an IP router, a NAT, and an AP, and it's the NAT that probably contributes a lot to the connectivity failures people are seeing that go away when the "router" is rebooted --- NAT tables filling up due to many half-open or lingering connections that didn't get closed properly. The aggressive nature of many applications' connection usage (e.g. "why does my router stop responding when I use torrents?") doesn't help either.
- Senji 10y ago
  I've seen wifi AP+NAT+Router units that choke on 100 concurrent connections. Some of these are absolute trash.
- toast0 10y ago
  It's not just terrible NAT, although that's popular. I already do NAT on a PC server, so I run wifi routers in access point mode, and still need to do periodic reboots because the wireless interface stops working.
philjohn 10y ago
There are exceptions - the BT HomeHub and now SmartHub have always been rock solid for me.
- amatix 10y ago
  My BT HomeHub5 has been pretty unreliable - regular dropouts of Wifi from some Macs, similar to the DHCP thing that OP described. Then monthly reboots when everything stops. Performance is pitiful, but I blame that on the ADSL1 :)
rufius 10y ago
Do you have any recommendations?
snuxoll 10y ago
I find most consumer-grade Wifi routers make more than adequate ACCESS POINTS, but they suck at being an actual ROUTER. My TM-AC1900 (rebadged RT-68U with a T-Mobile logo on it) would need to be restarted daily, after I finished setting up my homelab two months ago I put a Ubiquiti EdgeRouter X in front of everything and just connected the old router to my switch and put it in AP mode, I haven't had my network die out on me and require reboots in months (with the exception of my cable modem going out).
weaves 10y ago
That's precisely what we're doing at eero. We have engineers focused on each part of the stack (wireless firmware + drivers, core OS, application layer, mobile, cloud, and data) and are pouring our efforts into a single sku. It's time that people had the network they deserve...especially since they run our homes.

shmerl 10y ago

For home usage, high end consumer routers with free firmware work just fine (something like Linksys WRT1900ACS with DD-WRT / OpenWRT).

zippergz 10y ago
Admittedly I haven't tried the newest models, but my experience with Linksys hardware and either ddwrt or tomato was pretty bad. Run for a couple of days and then require a power cycle. Seemed like a hardware issue.
- shmerl 10y ago
  WRT1900ACS is pretty good with DD-WRT (uptime can be until next firmware update). Linksys also sell special set of antennas, which improve signal range (costly but can be worth it depending on your situation). I think they target it for network enthusiasts, rather than very wide market, so they put some effort into quality there.
- GordonS 10y ago
  I've had the same experience with DD-WRT on TPLINK hardware. DD-WRT has great features but always seems to require a reboot every 1-2 days :(
  - semi-extrinsic 10y ago
    Counterpoint: I run dd-wrt on a TPLINK el cheapo something at the office, to connect all the boxen and let me SSH into each of them (port forwarding 19 to 22 on box1, 20 to 22 on box2 etc). It Just Works, never had to reboot it in four years now. (WiFi is off though.)
- Jaruzel 10y ago
  Likewise. I ended up reverting a couple of my Linksys APs and WRTs back to stock firmware and living with the lack of features...
- matheweis 10y ago
  I'm running tomato on a WNR3500L/U/v2... uptime is 134 days and I'm pretty sure the last bounce was a power outage. So, ymmv?
- darryl42 10y ago
  dd-wrt has gotten pretty bad. They don't publish new releases anymore you just pick a daily build from one of the random people who publish builds and hope it doesn't brick your router. Learned this after bricking my router :(
_RPM 10y ago
I have the 1200AC it's got a 1.3 mhz proccessor. Not sure if it's as good as the 1900
- shmerl 10y ago
  WRT1900ACS has 1.6 GHz dual core CPU (Marvell Armada chipset): https://wikidevi.com/wiki/Linksys_WRT1900ACS https://wikidevi.com/wiki/Linksys_WRT1900ACS

valine 10y ago

Are there any specific business class routers you would recommend?

ggggggggggw 10y ago
i actually edited my post to include the thing about openwrt/ddwrt. If you need stability, go with a high end consumer router and load OpenWRT/DDWRT on it. OpenWRT and friends are very stable, but don't often take advantage of advanced features like automatic channel selection, traffic prioritization, or beamforming. If you absolutely need features, go with a ubiquiti AP. My only issue with them is their hardware leaves a lot to be desired, and is rarely powerful enough to cover a full home, this isn't necessarily ubiquiti's fault though. Business class APs expect you to set up multiple APs in the office, so their hardware is typically a lot less powerful than what you'd see in a consumer wireless router. A ubiquiti AP will gladly cover your 1 bedroom apartment, but don't expect it to cover your 3 bedroom home
- js2 10y ago
  I have a pair of AC lites covering 4200 sq feet across 3 floors. One is in the upstairs hallway and the other in the basement ceiling.
- ajdlinux 10y ago
  I would love to use {Open,DD-}WRT, but it seems there's generally not great support for DSL modems :(
  - mindslight 10y ago
    Use a separate modem and router. If you can disable NAT on your current combo unit then you already have the modem.
  - stordoff 10y ago
    I ended up just keeping my ISP router as is, and putting a DD-WRT router behind it. I suspect the double layer of NAT isn't great, but I've been doing it for years without issue. DD-WRT has been pretty solid for that, even in non-ideal network setups (currently have it connected to the ISP router as a 2.4GHz client, then acting as a 5GHZ AP for my other devices).

MBCook 10y ago

This is why I was happy with my Apple products for years. No matter what kind of third-party thing I'd buy it would end up being a piece of trash after a little while. Apple Airports tended to just keep working for my family. Too bad the new ones are ugly as hell. Oh well, my older model still works. And these days so many people get it through their cable provider (or DSL, whatever) who have a marked interest in not generating support calls means you may get decent equipment.

ggggggggggw 10y ago
> And these days so many people get it through their cable provider (or DSL, whatever) who have a marked interest in not generating support calls means you may get decent equipment. You would think that, unfortunately it isn't true. Usually those ISP provided combination routers are completely outsourced - as in their hardware and firmware are both made by a chinese OEM overseas. Believe me when I say there is nothing worse than the firmware on those chinese routers. They'll grab a bunch of open source software, reskin it, plug the chipset's reference driver into the OSS, then do a basic sanity test and ship it. You get what you pay for, and the ISPs want to pay as little as humanly possible. I don't know what they do about the support. I remember one time we brought in an ISP's combination modem/router for performance tests against our device lineup, and it would crash if you ever tried to pull more than 40mbit/s through its ethernet ports.
- MBCook 10y ago
  That's unfortunate. I never really use the Wi-Fi on my Comcast box so I don't know if it was any good. I've had great experiences with people Google fiber boxes, but that's Google and isn't exactly a mass deployment so…
- mgkimsal 10y ago
  > You get what you pay for, and the ISPs want to pay as little as humanly possible. More a case of you get what they (the ISP) pays for (or doesn't pay for).
- halostatue 10y ago

ashitlerferad 10y ago

Or get a sane router: https://omnia.turris.cz/ https://omnia.turris.cz/

ggggggggggw 10y ago
The problem with Omnia is that it's a niche product that is very unlikely to ever sell outside of its niche. Also, it's being made by people who haven't made a router before. 99% of the issues you'll ever have with your wifi router are driver issues. Omnia is using OpenWRT for their base, however they'll still have to make the chipset driver work with OpenWRT, and at a reasonable speed. Even if they get the driver working, it's unlikely that the device will be running at speeds comparable to other market competitors. It takes lots of unpleasant driver hacks, custom networking stacks, and prioritization magic to hit the benchmark numbers that Asus, Netgear, and Linksys push out. I'm not saying you should write off the Omnia completely, I just recommend sitting back and waiting for it to be released/benchmarked before purchasing it.
- matt4711 10y ago
  What about AVM products such as a Fritzbox (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz!Box https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz!Box) ? Primarily a german product but also available internationally (e.g. Australia)
  - fifteenforty 10y ago
    The Fritz!box is the only router I recommend to friends. I've run into few problems with them, except persistent issues with the web interface responsiveness. The only real problem is that they are relatively expensive. It's hard to convince people to spend 4x the amount because it's "better". I think most non-geeks don't realise just how bad their routers are making their web experience.
    - MrBuddyCasino 10y ago
      In my experience, the wifi performance of Fritz! boxen sucks. Is this still the case? I ordered a Netgear Nighthawk R7000 and I'm very happy with it.

xyzzy123 10y ago

My experience is that most consumer routers are actually developed and maintained by teams at companies you've never heard of overseas. This is partly as a response to the engineering challenges you've outlined. Taiwan is a popular choice, due to the combination of proximity to manufacturing in China and an English friendly business culture. Every so often the big brands go shopping to build a new product and they select something that meets their needs from the white-label products available. The product then gets customised for them. What the big brands contribute is industrial design of the case, some qa, packaging, ui styling, a distribution channel and consumer trust in their name. Which leads to funny scenes like watching engineers at a white label do board relayouts and emi retesting because the industrial designer wanted the antennas to sprout out of a different bit of the case. Because it looks more badass that way... This also leads to the phenomenon where say, v4.15 of a router was cool, but 4.16 sucks - because internally its a totally different chipset, with a different os (e.g. vxworks vs Linux). Ref e.g. WRT54... The reason this happens is not because the brand name rewrote anything - they just selected a different white label partner who customised a totally different product to look the same (probably because they promised to deliver cheaper for same SKU). This then gets sold under the old, popular model name.

Joof 10y ago

It's pretty obvious that 2 and 3 are a big problem. I'd pay significantly more for a router that I can guarantee works reliably (cost doesn't seem to make a difference for consumer router reliability); find a way to advertise that and I'll love you forever. Make packet loss and latency on a variety of popular hardware / OS (with default settings) THE key metric.

semi-extrinsic 10y ago
Protip: if you are willing to pay more for reliability, buy Ubiquiti (or other enterprise class) hardware. It's actually not that much more expensive, and you get great features like PoE, design/color ment to be invisible, and great handover between multiple APs if you have a large house.

chrisked 10y ago

What business class router do you recommend?

Jaruzel 10y ago
Draytek Vigor 2860 range: http://www.draytek.co.uk/products/business/vigor-2860 http://www.draytek.co.uk/products/business/vigor-2860 I finally gave up on consumer routers, and bought one of these instead - the learning curve is steep, but it's overloaded with features and runs brilliantly.
- lostboys67 10y ago
  My experience using draytek is that the documentation is non existent and the small amount that does exists makes the exotic bits of cisco documentation as clear as day.
  - Jaruzel 10y ago
    Well, yes. It's not easy, I did say that, but once you get past the knowledge hurdle, they are very good bits of kit.

pjc50 10y ago

> Consumer router sales are SKU driven. Why is this? It sounds like having recognition of your model numbers is a bad thing, if you need to keep revving them so much.

ggggggggggw 10y ago
People rarely recommend routers by their model number, if they recommend a router, they recommend the brand. It's very hard for marketing guys to call Costco and say "hey, you remember that router we tried to sell you 6 months ago? well we just gave it a firmware update!", and close the sale it's very easy for marketing to call Costco and say "hey we got this fantastic new router you guys might be interested in stocking", and close the sale

captn3m0 10y ago

Is there any specific reason why consumer grade router companies (like D-Link) drop their own OS entirely and shift to a open-source alternative? That should bring down development costs somewhat I'm guessing and force them to make different boards compatible. Not a hardware guy, but I've looked at D-Link firmware code in the past, and it is just utterly shoddy. Just making the hardware and making sure it is compatible with some router-os should be simpler. (Essentially what happens in the mobile/laptop industry with android/windows).

chadgeidel 10y ago
Maybe not exactly what you want, but Netgear has a fairly wide range of routers with open source firmware support and have a dedicated site [1] for that. I've had good luck with the previous 2 Netgear routers (WNR3500 and WNDR3700) and will probably buy another one again in the future. [1] https://www.myopenrouter.com/ https://www.myopenrouter.com/

userbinator 10y ago

I think the problem is not with the actual IP routing part, as that is relatively straightforward, but with all the other value-added "features" that get crammed into the same and often underpowered hardware. At the least, a consumer WiFi router will contain an IP router, a NAT, and an AP, and it's the NAT that probably contributes a lot to the connectivity failures people are seeing that go away when the "router" is rebooted --- NAT tables filling up due to many half-open or lingering connections that didn't get closed properly. The aggressive nature of many applications' connection usage (e.g. "why does my router stop responding when I use torrents?") doesn't help either.

Senji 10y ago
I've seen wifi AP+NAT+Router units that choke on 100 concurrent connections. Some of these are absolute trash.
toast0 10y ago
It's not just terrible NAT, although that's popular. I already do NAT on a PC server, so I run wifi routers in access point mode, and still need to do periodic reboots because the wireless interface stops working.

philjohn 10y ago

There are exceptions - the BT HomeHub and now SmartHub have always been rock solid for me.

amatix 10y ago
My BT HomeHub5 has been pretty unreliable - regular dropouts of Wifi from some Macs, similar to the DHCP thing that OP described. Then monthly reboots when everything stops. Performance is pitiful, but I blame that on the ADSL1 :)

rufius 10y ago

Do you have any recommendations?

snuxoll 10y ago

I find most consumer-grade Wifi routers make more than adequate ACCESS POINTS, but they suck at being an actual ROUTER. My TM-AC1900 (rebadged RT-68U with a T-Mobile logo on it) would need to be restarted daily, after I finished setting up my homelab two months ago I put a Ubiquiti EdgeRouter X in front of everything and just connected the old router to my switch and put it in AP mode, I haven't had my network die out on me and require reboots in months (with the exception of my cable modem going out).

weaves 10y ago

That's precisely what we're doing at eero. We have engineers focused on each part of the stack (wireless firmware + drivers, core OS, application layer, mobile, cloud, and data) and are pouring our efforts into a single sku. It's time that people had the network they deserve...especially since they run our homes.