• mlg@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    TP-Link is excellent for cheap switching hardware which a ton of vendors overprice for the same quality. Its your OG made in China deal that works pretty well for the price.

    Otherwise, you should skip it as a router and instead opt for either a better AIO, or put in the 2 minutes of extra effort to get a cheap ethernet router and a separate AP because AIOs are still overrated in 2025 for the price per quality.

    Not to mention that 5 GHz channels are getting clogged these days even on the DFS channels which people shouldn’t be using all the time. I know its not possible for a lot of people, but you’re really better off on even bargain basement maximum cheapo Cat-5e cables.

    Gb WiFi speeds and MuMIMO not gonna matter when you have CSMA/CA throwing a metric ton of RTS and CTS packets causing increasing amounts of retries as you add stations.

    Probably worst scenario is if you’re living in an apartment surrounded by like 50 stations within range. No amount of 802.11 magic is gonna give you a stable connection.

    • floquant@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      1 day ago

      Spot on. Also, the popularization of wifi “smart devices” that often have a buggy or just bad network stack implementation does not help