Screwy network

[David Fletcher]

On Sun, 2022-02-20 at 17:37 -0500, Sam Varshavchik wrote:
> MR ZenWiz writes:
> 
> In the last couple of decades, consumer-grade routers have turned to
> crap.  
> In my case, my entire wireless router wigs out two-three times a
> year, and I  
> have to reboot it.

In my case, I'd been getting good service for maybe a decade from the
so-called superhub 2 from Virgin Media although I was getting annoyed
by their regular price rises. Then, maybe about 9 months ago, it
started to go wrong. The WiFi was dropping out of service fairly
regularly, I kept getting more annoyed about it, rebooting the router
etc. Eventually it was going down several times per hour some evenings,
so completely unusable and downright embarrassing when my son or
friends were needing to use it.

And now, the main thing that has annoyed me about routers of late, they
have restrictions on which ports I can forward. Why, I don't know. When
I complained to Virgin, they sent out a so-called hub 4 which, as Sam
suggests, is just crap. The superhub 4 allows all of the ports I need
to be forwarded, such as port 25 for my mail server. The hub 4
prohibits this, putting up some stupid bubble on the admin page stating
that certain ports are "reserved".

Fortunately Openreach had put fibre optic into my street a couple of
months before this so I basically told Virgin where to shove their hub
4 and asked Zen Internet to connect me to fibre. The router that Zen
supplied is also IMHO crap. It also prohibits the forwarding of certain
essential ports.

Luckily I have a very knowledgeable friend resulting in me now owning
two routers (so that I always have a spare), a Xiaomi AC2350 and a TP-
Link Archer C7. The important factor for me is that both routers have
been flashed with OpenWRT which is absolutely excellent. The Xiaomi has
been in use since early January and appears to give me slightly more
WiFi signal strength than the TP-Link but they are both rock solid and
the WiFi has never failed with either of them.

My advice for anyone dissatisfied is, if you can, use an ISP who gives
you the router ID and passcode to connect to their network, get fibre
into the home if possible and again if possible choose an ISP that
provides a fixed IPv4 address and IPv6 service. Zen provides all of
these. Finally get a router with OpenWRT. I bought both of mine from an
eBay seller.

Dave