I bought a cellphone from them many years ago and they never really supported it and I couldn't even buy a replacement battery.

Recently I bought a router with the firm intent of installing OpenWRT, but I received a newer revision that had a different CPU, less RAM, and less flash memory.

These events left a bad impression, but they do make affordable stuff with reasonable quality.

This also happened many years ago with Linksys (prior to Cisco). It’s not that uncommon for manufacturers to release new revisions of hardware without necessarily making it clear to the purchaser. If their purpose is to deliver a router and they can shave a few cents off the BOM with less RAM, but it still works with their software, why would they care. And once new revisions have been released into the supply chain, it can be hard to know exactly what version you are buying.

In the Linksys case, IIRC they eventually re-released the first revision WRT54G as the WRT54GL (for Linux), so that people who wanted different firmware could get the exact hardware they wanted.

We see this all the time with SSDs, where a high-spec model is released to reviewers, then a low-spec model is mass-produced and sold under the same model number. That's fraud, isn't it? Shouldn't it be?

In my experience, TP-Link always has the hardware revision on a label on the outside of the box.

This is even a common product development strategy: ship to market asap, optimize the margins later.

I want the most important performance characteristics that would be on a good datasheet to be maintained, even if there is no datasheet.

I'm getting ready to set a mesh network for my older parents as well. Do you have any suggestions for hardware and software? I live a ways away from them so I need this to be pretty much faultless. I don't want to drive 4 hours for IT support.

Both might be fundamentally evil or being, but they aren't different in danger based solely on how white they are.

And yes an American company in cahoots with the government having the ability to snoop on traffic and turn entire networks off, while bad, is nowhere near as bad as a Chinese one having the exact same capability.

Obviously this particular one isn't in non-Intel equipment, but...

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine

https://forum.openwrt.org/t/ipq4019-adding-support-for-tp-li...

All modern WiFi APs require closed firmware blobs that run below or parallel to OpenWRT.

You replacing the router OS with OpenWRT does nothing when the radio has full DMA access and runs its own OS on its own processor. The OpenWRT layer will have no idea what it's running/infiltrating/exfiltrating.

I say this as someone who has been running and building OpenWRT forever. It's great but it isn't a panacea.

If it dies tomorrow, what’s next, out of curiosity?

One of my 2 pcengines APUs has developed an issue with its solder joints I suspect. It hangs at the bootloader unless the unit is already warm. Can't complain at all, it lasted ages and problems like this are just life for things that thermally cycle, it was in a pretty extreme climate for most of its life. Doesn't help with me needing a replacement now pcengines is out of business though, hence getting a protectli box.

This is the route I went. After a decade plus of shite consumer routers and finally an EdgeRouter which died (along with Ubiquiti's quality) I bought a Protectli box, build and flashed Coreboot and run OPNSense.

It's been going strong with regular updates (and by regular I mean as regular as your Linux workstation) for over half a decade now.

It wasn't cheap, somewhere in the region of £700 after adding SSD and RAM but it's a way, way overkill model and never exceeds 10% RAM usage and 15% CPU with an IDS running and a bunch of VLANs and Gigabit symmetric WAN.

My original goal for overspeccing it was longevity, but I regret it now, I want to upgrade to 10G+ networking and I can't justify replacing it when it runs so well and wasn't cheap.

For now, at least.

If it isnt AIDS then it is certainly a Cancer.

The radio sounds much like Intel's ME.

I think we all know there's a problem, but we don't have the power to do anything about it because what alternative is there? Ancient hardware?

A more serious problem is caused by the laptops having Intel WiFi, which is difficult to replace. With such a laptop one would have to disconnect the internal antennas and use an external WiFi dongle, to be sure that remote control is not possible.

I don’t know how much I trust TP Link, but my risk level is very low. There’s not much an attacker could do if they get on my network. None of my data is accessible on that network and everything important has MFA anyway. The most sensitive things are my POS and menu displays and they are just client devices connecting to the internet. I probably wouldn’t run this stuff in an environment where I had complex security requirements.