unboxing, review, and mini guide to my €20 router/access point of choice: TP-Link TL-WR841N

[manikyath]

So, i'm going to start with a quick preface:

I have 3 of these very routers, and one "slightly more high end" model that is starting to get a bit flaky after 4-5 ish years of torture, and is gonna be replaced by the specific piece of junk in this review. i'm happy with them because they do what i need them for, at an absolutely minimum cost. YES, this thing actually costs less than a quality 8-port switch. NO, do not expect any mindblowing performance from this thing, more on that later. Also, i *am* gonna be rather sarcastic in this review, because there is no serious way to talk about these

 

first: the unboxing:

starting with the packaging, its what you'd expect a box of empty promises to look like, with big numbers, fancy slogans, and nice icons:

 

tearing into the box, we find the contents, "slapped" in with great care, courtesy of TP-Link's very high standards:

greeted with a driver disc? and a few booklets, let's see what we have:

i'll let you look for yourself, but its mostly the stuff they're required to have in there: quicktart guide, full featured instructions, technical support numbers, and some other stuff.

 

back to the box, we find the device itself (with hardmounted antennas, that are actually decent enough for me to not care about them being hardmounted)

offcourse with a big sticker prompting us to read the quick start guide. i *actually* bothered checking the quickstart guide.

 

the front gives us an ikea-style guide basicly telling anyone that has ever touched the guts of a computer that it's plug & play.

the back tells us the vareous setup options: wired or wireless (with or without the driver disc thing) or their app, which i'm not gonna bother with.

 

i guess its there for the people who need it, but i'm just gonna skip RIGHT over it since i've been here 3 times already.

 

oh, should mention, theres some bonus junk in the bottom of the box:

the 9V 0.6A wall plug on the left, a CAT5 cable on the right, yes folks, not CAT5e, CAT5. not like you'll be anything with CAT5e with this device either way. why? more on that later.

 

the back of the device itself shows us the options we have:

a big power button (i want all network devices to have this, PLEASE manufacturers implement this on more devices...)

the power input, which is one of the most universal jacks i've seen, TP-link uses these, D-link, motorola's network devices, linksys, and even some laptops use them.

next up are the THANKFULLY clearly marked WAN and 4 LAN ports

the WPS button (that i never get to work, at least its the reset button too...)

and finally a physical wifi on/off button, once again, PLEASE manufacturers, i need this in my life.

 

now, if we take a closer look at the ethernet ports, that may give an insight on the "empty promises" and the CAT5 cable.

the sharp eyed may already catch a glimpse of something, for those who are as blind as me, i have a nice angle shot:

 

yes people, your "300Mbit wireless router" has 100Mbit ports (the two non-connected pairs are for gigabit). now, i havent tested it with this specific device, but on the old one it's replacing... those actually dont even make it past 50Mbit reliably

 

now, time for part two of the mess:

the mini-tutorial to set this thing up.

 

you will need offcourse.. a device to press buttons on:

i decided to try setting it up wirelessly at first: spoiler, that didnt last very long.

 

connecting to the device is easy, because its a router, and has its own dhcp, so we just punch in the device's default lan address and get to the login page:

props to TP-link, they actually improved this over the old device. not that its necessarily "better" but at least its a bit more modern.

 

once logged in with the default admin admin, like a true sysadmin , we are greeted with a quick setup which i cant do anything with, because the device needs something plugged in WAN for that, and i'm lazy.

if you're setting it up as your main wireless router, this should cover ll you *need* to change.

 

down the advanced path, i usually start with changing its LAN IP address.

 

now, this is where you have 3 possibilities:

- if this is your main, and only router, you can ignore this, default will do.

- if you have double NAT, set it to a subnet that is not your other router's subnet. (in case of 190.168.x.x, the first X.)

- if you are going to use it as an access point only, make sure its in your other router's subnet, and set to an IP address that is not in use. (depends on your main router's DHCP settings)

 

default TP-Link has this, i opted for the following settings:

basicly, i use the 192.168.1.0 subnet, and have 1-10 reserved for network devices, of which this one is the fifth.

 

next up is the wireless settings, and where it all went horribly wrong:

get an SSID you'll find in the pile of the neighbor's horribly named networks.

set your region to whatever you live in, its a legal thing because standards are not the same everywhere.

and finally, set your channel to something that is not clogged up, if you set this to 6, you're most lkely one of the 10 idiots within my range that are battling over that channel...

(in fact, i'm the only one *not* on 6...)

 

after pressing save the device refused to let me connect to continue the setup, so this is where i went to wired, as i'm used to.

 

next up is the wireless security:

no, that is not my password, dont be an idiot. also, dont use WEP, that makes you an idiot as well. the moment i set up WEP i have about one shady van per month tapping into my wifi. (or trying to...)

 

basic guide to wifi passwords: dont make them short, thats how brute force attacks became a thing, get something long that you can easily remember, but is hard to guess for your neighbors. (so no pet names, not grandma's name 123, etc.)

 

this brings us to one final step, only applicable to those that intend to only use this thing as an access point:

disable DHCP, it'll prompt you to reboot, click reboot because turning these off and on *actually* doesnt reboot them.

 

then just install it in place, i dont have fancy shots of this, because its kinda self-explanatory:

- plug it into the wall power.

- if using it as your main/double NAT router, plug the uplink (what goes towards the modem) in the blue WAN port, plug all else in the LAN ports.

- if using it as an access point only, plug EVEYRTHING in the lan ports, and leave the blue WAN port unused. (theres stuff you can do with this, but thats not something i'm gonna bother with here)

 

power it on, and BOOM! you're left waiting for 20 minutes while the device tries to grasp heads or tails what the hell your network is, and in the end it (hopefully) works.

 

brings us to the final bit:

the review and conclusion:

 

is this a quality device?

no, dont be an idiot, my ethernet cables cost more than this thing.

what is it capable of?

well... if all you do on wifi is facebook, cat videos, or sending e-mail, and want a cheap device that *just* gets the job done, go for one of these i guess..

how fast is it?

excuse me, you must have misspoken, you mean how "slow" is it right? the fastest i've ever gotten out one of these, is before mentioned 50Mbps, the 300Mbps on the box is such a hilareous overestimation that they should put an "april fools" sticker in the box...

why did you buy it if it sucks so much?

well.. if you have gotten this far missing all the price references: they are DIRT flipping cheap. i can buy a master carton of these for the price of a decent access point. i dont need speed when wireless, nor does anyone else in my house. if you want speed, you should get a cable.

 

all in all, for the price you can find these at, TP-Link honestly did a really good job. their UI is honestly quite good, and universal across all their devices. they *should* support some opensource firmwares, but somehow the devs are unable to get their hands on these to do propper testing. maybe its because no one in their right mind would buy these to put a custom firmware on them, because it wont do any good anyways.

 

the performance is horrible, both LAN and wifi is a joke, but the price is honestly a bit funny as well.. i mean, if i go pick up one of these at the store i pay more for my gas than i pay for the device. its a very low end device, for a very rock bottom price. i've seen replacement antennas go more expensive than this brick.

 

in conclusion: is this device any good? and should you buy it?

 

no, its horrible. But if you're at a budget, or just dont care enough to spend large amounts of money on network devices that deliver high speed... i guess go ahead. for me the wifi is only here for my phone, and so my laptop doesnt *need* to be tethered by an ethernet cable. it does what it needs to do, and does so very cheaply.

[Mohenjo]

now do a "will it blend" 

[ZetZet]

Wow that's fancy. I have TL-WR740N. And if windows speed when transferring files was to be trusted it actually does 100mbit over wi-fi at least. Can't test if it does 150 because my desktop is connected over Ethernet which is 100mbit.

 

 

 

wi-fi

it's hard to tell if it's the router or my shitty laptop wi-fi card though

 

wired

[manikyath]

14 minutes ago, ZetZet said:

Wow that's fancy. I have TL-WR740N. And if windows speed when transferring files was to be trusted it actually does 100mbit over wi-fi at least. Can't test if it does 150 because my desktop is connected over Ethernet which is 100mbit.

it tends to vary hugely depending on device, i have a laptop that pulls 40Mbps on this thing, i also have one that only does 20Mbps, but if i hook that up to a decent access point it gladly does whatever that access point is rated at.

[ZetZet]

2 minutes ago, manikyath said:

it tends to vary hugely depending on device, i have a laptop that pulls 40Mbps on this thing, i also have one that only does 20Mbps, but if i hook that up to a decent access point it gladly does whatever that access point is rated at.

well devices vary greatly too.

[AlexGoesHigh]

Yes, this thing is a dirt cheap PoS, hell, yesterday i pulled one i had in my closet and set it up as a bridge for another pc in the house, i have the one that runs the v7 firmware and has detachable antennas, i actually had issues setting up the bridge with the default firmware and instead of messing with it more, i put DDWRT on it and set up the bridge following the guide in their wiki, it works as it should for a pc that is pretty much going to go to FB and email, also for my super shitty internet of 2mbits