Review on 📶 TP-LINK Archer C7 AC1750 Gigabit Dual Band Wireless Router with WiFi by Michael Boyce

of which focuses on network infrastructure. Over the years, I've watched TP-Link evolve from a low-cost NIC to a solid SOHO device vendor. This product is not what it should be for the price and there is no product support. The issues I had were the device not working half the time and the unreliability seemed to be due to the 5GHz band being on. I thought I just got a bad block, but that's a common problem with Archer C7. Bottom line, I paid for a dual-band WiFi router, but it actually only works in 2GHz single-band mode. I've been patiently waiting for a firmware update to fix this issue, but I've been waiting for it for 7 months. there was no update. There is no excuse for not releasing firmware updates. There must be bugs or security issues that need to be fixed. No firmware updates means they are worth this product and live with. I was hoping to install dd-wrt as a plan B, but dd-wrt will not work on this model unless you remove the internal 5Ghz card. .Looks like the 5GHz card is missing quality Linux drivers. This is probably the main reason why the 5 GHz band makes the device unreliable. On the plus side, it transmits on the 2GHz band and is much stronger than my other 2GHz wireless hotspots. UPDATE: The device is dd-wrt compatible and I was able to install it and all issues were resolved. If you have hardware version 2 or higher, you can roll back the default firmware and install DD-WRT. The good news is that all the problems I saw are gone now with DD-WRT. So I've raised my rating from two to three stars. With it, you don't need to reset the default firmware to get a stable working device. The problems I observed were probably also related to not using the WAN port. I have a pfsense firewall connecting to my broadband internet and providing firewall services. So my wireless router is only used as an access point as a bridge. It looks like the stock firmware doesn't handle this configuration well. Updated: 07/10/2017. I wanted to come back to let you know that this router is solidly stable and performing after flashing it with DD-WRT a few weeks ago. I'm revising the title of this review to reflect this, but not increasing the stars as the buyer doesn't have to waste time and end up changing the firmware to get a stable product. It's clear that the issues I've encountered aren't hardware related, meaning the factory firmware should have worked. BTW, yes I reflashed the firmware with an image from TP-Link to make sure it wasn't just that. somehow damaged, but questions remained.