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Hey, thanks for the great advice - here[0] is a comparison chart on Up/Downlink profiles and others from SmallNetBuilder for the first six models listed. Do yo

• minxomat 10y ago
  On the contrary, I use the Archer C7 as my main router and in my experience, it is by far the best router I've ever had (having previously used FritzBox, Speedport, Technicolor, Netgear etc.) Here's a quick rundown of what happened: The part of the city I live in was upgraded to fibre for free (Fiber 200, with 180 down and 90 up guaranteed) and I needed a router that could handle that. The way Fiber 200 works is pretty simple: The provided optical end terminal converts the incoming fibre line to Cat5e. It then creates a VLAN, with separate IDs for TV, VoIP and Internet. So you need a router with unbounded VLAN ID config. Of course you can pay the $150 for the ISP provided one. But I didn't need VoIP, so the Archer C7 seemed perfect. Anyway: Received C7 with old world-wide firmware. Immediately upgraded to the latest firmware, not realizing that this new version is region locked (no problem so far though). Tried to configure the VLAN for my Internet, realize that my ISP uses non-standard VLAN IDs which exceed the limit of the firmware. Call TP-Link (Germany). I was very surprised to speak to an actual engineer immediately. He knew the problem and recompiled the current beta firmware (with support for higher VLAN IDs) and sent it to me Now we run into the first problem: You can't flash beta firmwares after upgrading to the region-locked one. Call again - another very helpful engineer. He recommended flashing OpenWRT in recovery mode (FTP upload) and then flash the beta firmware from there. Flashed LEDE instead of OpenWRT (because I had it on hand), without any problems. Now I don't have any use for OpenWRT or LEDE. The functionality of the standard C7 firmware is more than enough for me. So I flashed the beta and everything worked. Here are a few other points about this router: - I pushed the internal switch to maximum capacity multiple times, even using unreasonable packet rates. The C7 doesn't even break a sweat. - I use the built-in media server to stream music to my Dumb-TV. Works great. - At one time, a friend brought his laptop over, which turned out to be infected. The C7 banned his device immediately, after it exceeded the DDoS protection limits I set. - I never had any downtime on this router. - WiFi performance is exceptional (up to 450M). In conclusion: I would recommend the Archer over any router in this price range any day. The painless flashing of OpenWRT and LEDE makes it even more awesome. Add to that the awesome and competent support experience. And by the way: You receive an actual paper manual on how to request the GPL'd code that's used in the stock firmware.