Review on Tenda MW6 802 11AC Mu Mimo System by Robb Fillmore

Okay, I only have a few hours. Here's the good and the bad. Good: The mesh cubes connected without any interaction from my side other than connecting the power supply. Surprisingly easy. This is definitely too much for my home. Ranch 1500 sq. ft. However, it was built in the early 1900's so the walls are chicken wire and stucco. Alone almost turned my house into a faraday cage lol. No WiFi router I've had could easily penetrate those walls. Eliminate dead zones anywhere in the home. It will cover 6,000 square meters. It now covers my entire house and extends into the yard about 20 to 40 feet. Thus, covering and switching between grid cubes is absolutely seamless. If the technology holds up, wire mesh and plaster walls will do too. None of the cubes are what I would call ideal locations. This is partly bad, partly good. The installation would be very easy if I knew about the problems described below. Reboot your modem, reconnect in a few minutes, set your Wi-Fi ID and password, and you're almost done. However, not knowing that you can't even do basic DHCP settings, I spent a couple of hours trying to get it working. Not sure: Wi-Fi is both 2.4GHz and 5GHz. You cannot separate them or enable/disable one of them or even set separate IDs. Depending on the signal and bandwidth, the cubes automatically switch between 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz. That's both good and bad, bad if you only want certain devices to run on 1 bandwidth. now you cannot separate them. Now for the bad: power supplies. The teeth point in the wrong direction. Instead of the adapter being on the side of the extension, it extends at least 1 or 2 points on the extension if you don't have an open endpoint. I still don't understand why this is even a problem in 2018. Is it really that difficult to make it so that it doesn't occupy other places on the extension cord? With Tenda's web app, almost nothing needs to be configured. This prevents you from setting your own DHCP scope. In fact, you have the option to select 10.0.0.1 or your modem's IP address. And here is the most disappointing. This will give you the address 192.168, but. and you will love it. Address 192.168.5.x.WTF? In a sane civilized world, why doesn't it choose 192.168.5 for anything and have it changed? Oh, all your devices configured with static IP addresses aren't even on the same damn subnet anymore! Here's one that will make some people laugh. This allows you to do port forwarding, but I can't stress enough how bad that is. You cannot set static IP addresses. What good is port forwarding if your IP changes? 99.9% useless. There is also no web interface that can be accessed via a computer. I called tech support and asked about these issues. Although this guy was very nice, I was basically told that the current version doesn't allow any of that. Maybe this could be added in future versions but I mean this is a super basic router that any $20 router will have. Another problem. This assigns a connection-specific DNS setting to tendrawifi.com. This will cause your first two DNS lookups to fail as it tries to resolve the tenawifi.com suffix and then goes to your DNS settings in the router. This is very bad and should be removed. Can I tell you that it has been missing for at least 5 months now and none of these features have been added in that time? Either this is currently their first true live version, or I can't even imagine what functionality it wouldn't have had there been previous versions. For those of us who like to work remotely with our home systems, there aren't any dynamic DNS options either (probably a bit more advanced). Feature) Well, with all that being said, this could easily be a 4-5 star product, and it's a huge IF when they add these core features found in pretty much the cheapest routers around the world are. This applies to firmware version 1.0.0.14 (4258). I'm trying to get this working but I feel like I have to send this system back. It just lacks a lot of basic features. I'd say if you're an average user with little to no networking knowledge trying to set this up, you can do it quite easily. However, if you do anything other than connect your computer and tablet to it, you won't be able to set it up. This means messing up cameras with static IPs, any servers you might be using, and a bunch of other stuff. This firmware needs a lot of improvement. Edit Note: When these features are added I'll be happy to update my rating to reflect it. As I said, this has a lot of potential. You just need to get some basic features and some additional features would be nice too, Dynamic DNS, Custom VPN so you can use VPN settings of your favorite service. Also some basic firewall settings. Update #1 4/20/18 They have updated the Wi-Fi app and added 2 new features. QOS And guess what, now you can assign your range of IP addresses. Well, the initial selection of variants discovered. You will be given a dial to select numbers. There's still a long way to go, but they seem to be listening.