Review on 🔌 5-Port Edgerouter Router with Power over Ethernet (PoE) by Joe Jordan

I just can't understand why this router has so many rave reviews. First, they position it as a 5-port router. Technically yes, but after subtracting the WAN ports you actually have less than 5. Why not remap the console port to something more useful? If you're not careful, your non-PoE gear can burn out. These are not 802.3af PoE ports. When I received this router I immediately attempted to update the firmware as recommended. The update interface did not work at all (delivered with firmware from 07/09/2013). 2013? This is 2019, the router was manufactured in 2018. To update the firmware I had to use WinSCP to push the update .tar file to the router and then use the CLI to make it a bootable image. Speed, it takes about 5 minutes to restart, which wouldn't be an issue if the UI wasn't so buggy. Also, I updated the bootloader (there is also a separate update for this via the CLI) to try and fix the slow boot speed. That didn't happen. Finally, after getting it working with the latest 2019 firmware update, it's not capable of doing simple things like assigning more descriptive hostname aliases to MAC addresses like many consumer routers. This thing has apparently been in production for over 6 years and the UI is still buggy. You need to reload them to fix the UI bugs (5 minutes per reload). Also, this router gets very hot. Once I got it working, my internal network was slightly faster and webpages loaded faster. As someone said in a previous review, hardware gets 5 stars, firmware gets 1 star. There is a lot of information on the Internet about this router and how to set it up, as well as how to solve various problems that you may encounter during setup. Be prepared to spend some time on this. I'm just not happy with this purchase so I'll probably return it.