It may surprise you to know that the cheapest hardware rarely is the best. This my go against ones common senses as we assume that there is an inverse relationship between the price and the quality. I am here to tell you that this is not the case.
Where I work we sometimes need to buy hardware. The hardware we purchase can range from access points, motherboards, switches, laptops, usb flash drives or pretty much anything else that exists. But we tend to go for the cheapest. And we never ever ever ever have a piece of equiptment without problems. Well, ok. maybe I should say we rarely have no problems.
Today I am going to rant about Airlink 101. They are a relatively new company (visibility wise) on the market and, if one were to look at price lists, one of the cheapest. I don’t like them. Really Really Really don’t.
At the office we had purchased two identical routers, out of the box one of these routers simply never did anything, the other one functioned as it was indended. This was a bit of an abnormality, it is possible that we just somehow aquired a lemon. but don’t they do some verson of testing? I mean out of the box with default settings they should work. This one didn’t. fortuneatly we have not purchased anymore (that I know of)
More recently we have gotten into the habit of using Airlink 101 ap421w multifunction devices. As simple APs we have varied amount of success. At one location they simply and randomly disapear until the device themselves are rebooted. At another site the devices sometimes disapear and we have to reboot the switch that they are attached too. But at another site, things are working just fine. We can look at the sites and ask ourselves what are the differences? we may come up with evironmental, electrical interferance or simple power outages and brownounts. maybe these could be the culprits.
Last week we were asked to configure a set of these so that we had one access point broadcasting as an access point, and two other to pick up this signal and rebroadcast it. In this configuration we could then take a laptop and connect to any three of the devices and get out. this enables us to create a wireless network without having to run cables to every AP. It worked fine at the office. Using a laptop we were able to choose which ap we wanted to connect through (this cannot be done with the built in wireless software). We shipped the APs to the site and they were set up. But no matter what was tried no-one could connect to the two APs that were rebroadcasting.
Back at the office we struggled to understand why it was working here, but not there. We broke out two more of these APs and configured them. After much confusion we finaly noticed that in fact only ONE of the computers at the office could properly connect through these devices.
Calling tech support yeiled interesting results. You don’t want to do that, do this. You must tell your APs to attach to this other devcice (which was completely unrelated), You have it set up wrong, You are using the wrong addresses, I don’t know I will refur you to someone higher up. At the office we never got a call back. However the boss after complaining to tech support that he had purchased a lot of these, and that none of them were working was finaly put in contact with someone who suggested a firmware upgrade.
Firmware upgrades are normally usefull as they generally have fixes and new features. But what was interesting as this firmware, although over a year old, did not exist on the website as a download. we were emailed it. Upon instalation of said firmware, things got even weirder. At the office the devices responded much slower, it took forever to boot up and even longer for the APs to connect to eachother. On site however, nothing worked. they did not boot up properly and unless you reset the settings to factory defaults you could not talk to them at all. however I am assuming human error at that point.
Here at the office a few of the computers that could not connect now could (notice I said a few). But on site, nothing useful was happening.
The point I am trying to make is these devices, and possibly the company, should be avoided. They may be the cheapest in cost, but from our experience they are also lacking in quality. If only we can get that into our heads and stop using them. this little episode may do that.
But I should also mention that these are wireless devices. Wireless devices are evil. These perticular ones are using an Atheros chipset which is manufactured by a third party company. (Sort of like MSI building GeForce Video cards.) The Atheros chipset (or a similar one) was also found in another brand of APs that we seem to like using. These APs are not the cheapest on the market but had some additional security features that we wanted at the time. But we experienced similar problems with.
In addition to the afformentioned problems with the aps we were having trouble configuring them on the console, (text based configuration mode) and were completely unable to access them from outside the network (it is my opinion they don’t know what a gateway is).
If one were to look up the AP there are two reviews. Both of them saying they don’t work properly. I am not surprised
Yeah. avoid them whenever possible. I think anyway.