Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Ok, I have only had this for a few hours running. Here is the good and the bad. Good: The mesh cubes connected with no interaction from me other than plugging in the power. Wonderfully easy. This is most certainly overkill for my house. 1500 sq ft ranch. However it was built in the early 1900's so the walls are chicken wire and plaster. Almost making my house a faraday cage all by its self lol. Every wireless router I have had could not penetrate these walls easily. Leaving dead spots every where in the house. This is supposed to cover 6,000 sq ft. It does now cover my entire house and out into my yard for 20-40ft or so.So the coverage and the switching between mesh cubes is absolutely seamless. If the hardware holds up, it does a great job of getting through my chicken wire and plaster walls. None of the cubes are what I would consider in ideal locations either. Now this is part bad and part good. The install, if I had of known the issues below, would have been super easy. reboot modem, connect after a few minutes, set wifi id and password and you were pretty close to being done. However, because I didnt know you couldnt even set basic dhcp settings, I spent a couple hours trying to get this up and running Unsure: The Wifi has both 2.4ghz and 5ghz. You can not separate them or turn one of them on/off or even set separate IDs. The cubes automatically bounce you between 2.4ghz and 5 ghz depending on your signal and throughput.Its both good and bad, bad if you like to have certain devices only on 1 bandwidth. now you cant separate them Now the bad Bad: The power adapters. the prongs are facing the wrong way. Instead of the adapter being out to the side of your power strip, Its going to cover at least 1 or 2 spots on your power strip unless you have an end spot open. I still dont understand why these are even an issue in 2018. Is it that hard to make it so it doesnt take up other spots on the power strip? There is virtually no setup you can do with the Tenda network app. It will not allow you to set your own dhcp range. In fact, it gives you the option for 10.0.0.1 or the ip address from your modem, . Now here is the over the top upsetting one. It will give you a 192.168 address but... and your going to love this... 192.168.5.x address. WTF?????? why in any sane civilized world would it select 192.168.5 for anything nor will it let you change it? Oh, all your devices that are configured with static ips are no longer even on the same freaking subnet!!!! Here is one thats just going to make some folks laugh. It does allow you to have port forwarding but, and I cant stress how bad this is enough.... It does not allow you to set static IPs. what good is port forwarding when your ip is going to change? 99.9% useless. There is also no web interface to get to via your computer. I called tech support and asked about these issues. While the guy was very nice, I was basically told the current revision does not allow any of those things. Its possible it may get added in future revisions but I mean come on, this is super basic router stuff that any $20 router will have. Another issue. This assigns a connection specific dns setting to tendrawifi.com This causes your first 2 dns lookups to fail as its trying to resolve this tendawifi.com suffix, then it will go to your dns settings in the router. This is very bad and needs to be removed. This has been out for at least 5 months that I can tell, and none of these features have been added in that time? Either this is currently their first actual live rev or I cant even imagine what functionality it didnt have if there are earlier revs. There is no dynamic dns options for those of us that like to remote into our home systems either (probably a little more advanced feature) Now with all this said, this could easily be a 4-5 star product IF and this is a huge IF they add these basic features that can be found in practically the cheapest routers known to man all over the world... This is for firmware version 1.0.0.14(4258) Im trying to make this work but I have a feeling im going to have to send this system back.Its just lacking in so many basic needed features.I would say that if you are average joe user with almost no networking knowledge and are trying to set this up, You could do it easy enough. But if you do anything other than connect your computer and tablets to it, your not going to be able to do any configuration. This means cameras with static ips are screwed, any servers you may be running and a host of other stuff. This firmware needs serious work. Edit note: If these features get added, I would gladly update my rating to reflect it. Like I said, this has great potential. They just need to get some basic features in and some advanced features would be nice as well, Dynamic Dns, configurable vpn so you can use the vpn settings of your favorite service. Some basic firewall settings as well. Update Number 1 4/20/18 They updated the wifi app and added 2 new features. QOS And guess what, you can now assign your ip range. Well, the starting range of the detected choices. You get a pinwheel to select your numbers. Still have a long way to go, but it appears they are listening.