I paid £35 from Ali and the best part of the encryption is that the entire menu is in Chinese which can't be changed! Be interesting to see if the range is better than VM SH3 when I finally get the plug adaptor tomorrow !
Affordable WiFi 6 router?
- Thread starter deanjesper
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As I said, given that mine only cost £7/£15 more than yours (I don’t pay the VAT as I claim it back) I think you got a poor deal there, but knock yourself out. I can tell you that it will indeed allow you to select 200mW power output if you pick the correct country code from the menu at setup. But I’m a good little user and selected UK and it works really well. Incredibly well for the money.
It doesn't allow a country code it's China only, if you got the EU / rest of world then it's interesting that it allows country selection. The China version won't even allow an English Language App for the settings, its absolutely set to China and no changes are allowed.
Well it's now set up and running, after some 'interesting' wrestling with the Mandarin which wouldn't allow a translation to get into the damn thing to start with! However now it is set up I have to say it is twice as quick as the Virgin SH3 on the WiFi and the range is extremely good. It has the rather amusing settings for power of off sleep, so-so and go through the wall!
It's going to take a few more days of set up because there are still several devices on the SH3 which will need to be transferred across before I can turn the hub off WiFi. Despite the range being good at the front of the house, at the rear there is no signal strength at all, what you get for thick walls perhaps.
It's going to take a few more days of set up because there are still several devices on the SH3 which will need to be transferred across before I can turn the hub off WiFi. Despite the range being good at the front of the house, at the rear there is no signal strength at all, what you get for thick walls perhaps.
The challenge for all WLAN access point designers is that the ideal place to have the antennae is in the middle of a circular flat box about 25cm across. So when they design them to be screwed in at the back what they’re basically expecting is you you to put the device up against a wall which bounces some of the omnidirectional signal back in front of the device.
If you want to test this, get a piece of cardboard about 25cm across and cover it with tinfoil. Then punch holes in it and stick the 4 antennae through. I suspect it will work rather better now. Going up higher is also a good idea. If your access point is currently on the ground floor, put it upstairs and coverage will usually improve.
If you want to test this, get a piece of cardboard about 25cm across and cover it with tinfoil. Then punch holes in it and stick the 4 antennae through. I suspect it will work rather better now. Going up higher is also a good idea. If your access point is currently on the ground floor, put it upstairs and coverage will usually improve.
I’m fed up of the VM Superhub 3 being so poor at routing. £50 on this might be worth a punt. My only concern is that I have 4 wired devices and would need to choose one to swap to wireless in order to run in modem mode with external router... which would be a pain. Also potentially having to change all the smart plug/device settings at home.
A cheap gigabit switch is £30-ish (UniFi Flex Mini) and you don’t need to change anything except the SSID and password on the new router.
I use a netgear 8 port one, but do remember when you put the hub3 into modem mode only one RJ45 socket will work and that absolutely has to go to the router which needs to be in DHCP mode.
Unfortunately for me the modem mode doesn't work on the router, and instead of the bottom light turning purple it turns red and ALL the RJ45s turned off, none of them worked, and the only way to regain control was to reset the router. Until I can get a new router I won't be able to attempt this and VM no longer offers any kind of telephone support and have used to excuse of Covid to completely withdraw it.
I have to say I'm getting a little bit tired of the whole COVID excuse. Sure their call-centers may be closed or operating at reduced capacity but are you honestly telling me they can't organize phone support from home for their staff?
So are you running double-NAT at the moment?
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Netgear 5 port gb switch is about £17
Or you can use old routers, if you have any, as switches. Just have to configure them, I use an old linksys wifi router as a gb switch. (May need dd-wrt so given how cheap switches are it might not be worth the effort)
Or you can use old routers, if you have any, as switches. Just have to configure them, I use an old linksys wifi router as a gb switch. (May need dd-wrt so given how cheap switches are it might not be worth the effort)
They'll be both in AP mode double nat is just a pain to deal with.
Draytek
Plenty of companies... Ubiquiti, Mikrotik, Draytek, Cisco, TPLink, Netgear... the list goes on
Apparantly they are called (rather confusingly) wired routers, and wow they aren't cheap if you want more than 4 ports! The Ubiquiti 10 port version however does look quite nice at a more reasonable £80. Seems many of these are commercial IT solutions for rack mount where WiFi is not a favoured solution.
I have a netgear switch, but all that does is distribute bandwidth. I was looking for something which would work as a wired only router on the other side of the cable modem (or hub in modem mode).
https://www.ui.com/edgemax/edgerouter-10x/
That will work as a router, but it will still need a switch. Effectively all the ports on that are routed. You can make them work like a switch, but it will be very slow. You're much better off with something like the EdgeRouter-X - the very basic looking one. Or something like a Mikrotik hEX. And then use a separate switch. It's confusing because it looks like it should be a switch. It's wired very differently inside though.
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Just received and plugged in my Honor 3 router. Really straightforward setup and performance seems good so far. Sadly I think my personal cloud NAS might have a fault, as it isn’t even being detected by the router when connected via wired connection (all other devices are), but can’t complain with the new router thus far.
How are you guys getting on with the Honor 3 ones? Would be good to get a summary post as to where we stand now with what wifi 6 options to consider on the market now. I was looking to get some unify 6 access points but there does not appear to be stock anywhere. Happy to go with the quad core AX3 mentioned but had some concerns on it:
1: Can it be used only as an access point and placed into such a mode?
2: I saw a comment from someone on HUKD where they state this:
"
I bought the quad core version from Huawei for £45 but sent it back because you cannot turn off automatic updates* and there are a number of features missing from the firmware.
*You can disable it but it then redirects EVERY HTTP request to an update firmware nag page whose only option is to enable automatic updates. Apart from being impossible with the web, this breaks lots of non-web things that use HTTP to communicate."
1: Can it be used only as an access point and placed into such a mode?
2: I saw a comment from someone on HUKD where they state this:
"
I bought the quad core version from Huawei for £45 but sent it back because you cannot turn off automatic updates* and there are a number of features missing from the firmware.
*You can disable it but it then redirects EVERY HTTP request to an update firmware nag page whose only option is to enable automatic updates. Apart from being impossible with the web, this breaks lots of non-web things that use HTTP to communicate."