Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

While I absolutely love the size and flexibility of this router, there are certain things that this router can definitely do better, especially considering its price range and description. Here's my overall take on this router: Pros: 1. Powered by Micro USB. Minimal power current draw ~0.48A @ 5.00V peak at load. No problems powering the device using the laptop's USB ports. 2. USB type A connector that can be used to connect Android phones or USB modems for tethering purposes. 3. Good Ethernet performance - ~90Mbps up/down when connected to a gigabit port. 4. SD card slot - An available SD card for expandability. 5. The device is supported by the official OpenWrt repo in the snapshot branch (ar71xx/generic). Neutral / Observations: 1. This device has 100M Ethernet ports (will only connect at 100M line rate when connected to a gigabit port). 2. The Micro USB port is placed at a rather awkward location, which makes the device larger than it really needs to be. 3. The router has some preinstalled software and add-ons that are more catered towards the Chinese community (e.g. Shadowsocks), and in order to get to the actual LEDE/OpenWrt interface, you will have to go through a custom UI before you are prompted for the LEDE/OpenWrt login. 4. This device is only 1T1R on the 5Ghz band, which means it will not support 866Mbps on that band. Rather, the rate is capped at 433Mhz. However, the 2.4Ghz band is 2T2R which lets it support up to 300Mbps on 2.4Ghz devices. The device does not have any accessible antenna connectors on the outside and all available connectors are on the board itself (1 connected to an external antenna for 5Ghz inside the box). 5. This device comes with a USB 2.0 port. 6. The device has a 16MB flash memory, which is generally enough for most software installs. After installing various VPN and system components, you generally have about 30% space left on that partition. Cons: 1. Wi-Fi performance is a bit on the unstable side, even on the 5Ghz band and at close distances - while I can get 160Mbps on my native Linksys router (my full WAN speed), this router can generally only go up to ~70-80Mbps on the 802.11ac band (considering the 100M Ethernet WAN port), although it fluctuates greatly where sometimes I can only get around 30-40Mbps, and I have to change the channel constantly to get it back up again. This probably will not be that big of a deal since most public connections would not exceed this speed. On the 2.4Ghz band the performance was closer to 20-25Mbps, but that's expected due to congestion on the 2.4Ghz band (even though my Linksys router performs better on the 2.4Ghz range.) 2. Although this product has an upgraded radio (802.11ac support) compared to the older GL-AR300M, the manufacturer decided to keep the same single-core CPU on this device. (Qualcomm Atheros QCA9531 - 1 core x 650 Mhz). This is a bit unfortunate since CPU bottlenecks often become an issue on a device such as this one where there is only one core and at a relatively low clock speed. 3. Horrible crypto performance - I am quite disappointed with GL-Net the way they have advertised this device. While this device was supposed to be designed for creating a VPN connection to safeguard your travel network, its hardware is underspec'ed to handle the task. For example, AES-128-GCM benchmarks only resulted in about 4 MB/s while many other devices in this class usually have at least 4-5x that speed (most likely due to the lack of hardware crypto, low clock speed, and one CPU core.) While running an IPsec connection with ~9ms latency, the average throughput on Ethernet using AES-128-GCM/CCM was about (10-14Mbps - max 20), and when using AES-128-CBC/SHA1, the throughput improved slightly to an average of 17-20 Mbps - max 28). Since this was done under optimal latency conditions, you are more likely to get about a max of 10-15 Mbps on an actual VPN connection, especially when you are using a CPU intensive protocol such as OpenVPN and/or if you are using Wi-Fi instead of Ethernet. 4. The Ethernet ports on the device do not have status indicator lights in the front or the back, so it is impossible to tell if a device is connected properly or if the connection is working without logging into the router itself. 5. The WAN port looks exactly the same as the LAN ports without any kind of color-coating. The only indication you will see is a small engraving on the port itself, hence it is especially easy to plug this into the wrong port causing DHCP leakage via the LAN port (and possibly get in trouble for it). 6. The device is using an older snapshot build of LEDE, which can be problematic when you want to download packages that require kernel changes as the updated packages would require a snapshot kernel rather than the one installed on the device. It is possible to build your own image using the image builder on the snapshot branch, but this can be quite tedious if you are going to be modifying your router often. This problem will most likely go away once this router is supported on the mainline branch. 7. The device cannot be readily opened by unscrewing the device. For a company as dedicated as GL-Net to OpenWrt/LEDE, I am surprised they left out this design detail. Since flashing open sourced firmware have a much higher chance of a brick than official firmware, most companies that have open-sourced firmware (like the Linksys WRT series) usually feature some easy to open design (rather than clips) to allow direct access to the serial and other terminals for ease of recovery and modification. This device instead has a bottom screw and 2 front clips that hold the device together. At least they have the serial header terminals already attached once you are able to open the box. 8. While you can plug in an SD card into this device, it does not necessarily expand the device's storage automatically. Rather, you can use it to share files which may not work so well on a device that has a relatively slow CPU. There is a way to indeed expand the 16 MB flash space with the SD card using extroot overlay methods, but this does not appear to be the intention of the SD card slot. 9. Cost - I am not quite sure why GL-Net products are priced comparatively high when compared to other products on the market. For a cheaper price, you can get a router that has more ROM + RAM, CPU power, 2T2R on both bands, and even USB 3.0. The company also has a home router model that is about double this current price, but I am not sure whether the hardware is worth that much considering what's out there. 10. Customer support - I have contacted customer care regarding my concerns but it took them 4 days to respond to my email. Since the company is located in China, it probably won't be realistic to expect the same level of support as if you would from a seller/manufacturer in the United States. Overall, this device may be okay if you do not need VPN functionalities or if your throughput needs are no more than 10-15 Mbps (if that's the case, why do you need this in the first place?). And if you are going to spend that much money on this device, I would suggest doing yourself a favor and finding something better that would offer you better performance in the long run. I am going to return mine and get something that's more reasonable...