Posted by todsacerdoti 11 hours ago
I run OPNsense with a collection of Unifi radios (local controller) with great success.
Experts say while the proposed ban may have more to do with TP-Link’s ties to China than any specific technical threats
I would buy only Hue but that's because I have more money than sense, and they don't actually make smart plugs last time I looked, they make plugs but label them all as lights in the app, which is more annoying than it sounds.
The real problem to solve ditching TP-Link _routers_ is that all routers are uniformly fucking awful, and all you are doing is choosing your particular poison. This is especially true after Apple exited the game so long ago. I use Google Wifi because it mostly works most of the time, but that's not glowing praise. But the world has become trained that rebooting a router once a week and praying that it works when it comes back is a perfectly normal state of affairs and we couldn't possibly do this any better.
Ikea makes Zigbee smart plugs with power monitoring (Inspelning) that are ~10 Euro here (probably $10 in the US). Also Zigbee does not have all the security issues, since it is purely local and will talk with whatever hub/bridge you choose, e.g. Homey, Hubitat, or if you want to go free software Home Assistant or zigbee2mqtt.
It's somewhat insane to me that people use WiFi plugs for actuating things that actuate real-life electrical devices. Even more from companies that have a bad security reputation. Zigbee or Z-Wave all the way or possibly Matter over Thread, but the only Matter device that I had (an upgraded Eve Energy plug) has been a pain.
The real problem to solve ditching TP-Link _routers_ is that all routers are uniformly fucking awful, and all you are doing is choosing your particular poison. This is especially true after Apple exited the game so long ago.
I switched to Unifi gear (Cloud Gateway Max, two of their U7 access points, and a bunch of their managed switches) and they are a dream to set up. Making VLANs, associating VLANs with SSIDs, etc. is so easy. I had a TP Link managed switch and the interface was a huge pile of crap and I saved it several times after misconfiguration by virtue of it having a serial console. I only used it for two months or so because it was so frustrating.
My OPNsense router currently has 74 days of uptime, and that's just because I ran an update 74 days ago. I've never rebooted it to solve a problem. The only wrinkle is OPNsense (and pfSense) is at least an order of magnitude more complicated than your average consumer router.
OTOH, my ubiquity access point reboots itself every time I change any setting at all.
The mikrotik I've been using has been pretty solid, and super super customizable.
A router, a managed switch or something having an OS is another story.
I mean, in the case of actors like Huawei, you can at least credibly make the argument that the continued access of their support staff to internal provider networks is a significant risk, but that vector is entirely absent here.
Sure, embedded firmware has been, is, and will continue to be a tire fire prone to embarrassing compromises, but containing those is mostly about notification and containment by government agencies (which the current US administration is doing their utmost best to kneecap) and/or large ISPs (which in the US have traditionally never cared).
Forcing "foreign" products off the market in favor of "domestic" replacements with the exact same, if not worse, flaws won't fix a thing, unless you put some pretty significant controls into place that nobody is willing to enforce or even outline.
disclaimer: not connected in any way with Cisco, just disappointed business customer.
Separating routing from WiFi has been the best thing I’ve ever done for my network.
Separating router from the AP was something I considered too for building a 10 Gbps network, since I haven't found any WiFi router that could also handle 10 Gbps wired without some accelerator chip requiring non upstream mess to work.
TP-Link is the best for the same reason Apple is the best. They just have the momentum of being in the lead.
I would also say that TP-Link isn’t wildly and unrealistically cheaper or anything.
Their prosumer/business Omada lineup is clunky and kinda sucks compared to Ubiquiti.
Zyxel WiFi 7 APs are more competitively priced than basically anything last I checked.
I have no idea if that's still the case, especially post AMZ, but worth looking into if so.
They were... not great...