About to buy my 7th GLi device

Technical Support for Routers
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Gonna pick up a Beryl AX on holiday discount, to be used in Repeater Mode with a Slate AX upstream, wish me luck!

I was formerly using Creta in Repeater Mode, but upgrading to 4.x on the Creta rendered it unusable for this purpose. I was mad about it, after a day or two I’m no longer very annoyed - I’m trying to do a 5GHz wifi bridge thru 2 walls and a floor, even if 4.x was perfect on Creta, the hardware is just not up to the task.

I swapped in a Slate Plus (802.11ac) and the performance was so drastically better than the Creta (on 3.216 when it was stable), that I’m hoping upgrading to an AX-capable device will yield a similar gain in performance and hopefully also link stability. It’s a challenging environment.

Sometimes there are bugs, but in general, each new generation of wifi hardware really does perform substantially better than older ones in challenging environments.

So far of GLi’s lineup I’ve owned:

  • Brume 1 (my first)
  • Shadow with the big ROM and external antennae
  • Creta
  • Slate (which I gave away, sooo foolish of me :sob:)
  • Slate Plus (my current travel router, subbing in for Creta in wifi bridge)
  • Slate AX (my current primary router and wifi bridge head end)

It’s worth noting that I currently have very little income and live a semi-nomadic lifestyle, and GLi products have been extremely useful for trying to do this as a ‘tech person’ and power user who can’t work or play online with a crappy connection. Yes I’ve had to invest many hours of tinkering to come up with the right combo of firmware + settings to be rock solid stable (or as close as possible), but I also paid a very low price for all the above hardware.

Why am I posting this? Well, I don’t know really. I guess just to say, many of us here are frustrated about bugs - me too, certain parts of 4.x really need work - but also that, even as somebody who is easily annoyed when “basic infrastructure” is acting glitchy, I still find the products worth the money, and I appreciate being able to have a bit more insight into GLi’s development efforts because of the forum.

If I had $300 or $500 or more to drop on little network boxes, I might well try other manufacturers. GLi isn’t the only developer of OpenWRT-compatible network boxes. But I don’t have that money, and I do like the community here, and I go into it knowing that GLi’s consumer devices are quirky niche products, I will have to tinker a bit with them (sometimes a bit more than I want), but for the most part once I get them set up right, they do seem to work very well for the price.

And I do also greatly appreciate that for many (but not all) of the products, vanilla OpenWRT is another option, and that support even for old GLi devices is still improving with each new release.

Just my $.02 as somebody who started out with GL-iNet more than 3 years ago now. :slight_smile:

PS - I’m starting to compile my data on workarounds for some of the bugs I encounter. I’m hoping to have enough for a megathread on 4.x Repeater Mode bugs pretty soon.

PPS - I also have a Brume 2 on my Christmas list to use as a tiny NFS server velcro’d to the side of a 3.5" external HDD enclosure :smile:

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Just be prepared to a compile whole list of data dedicated for the fantastic amount of bugs and glitches that you will encounter with the Beryl AX as it is undoubtedly the worst GL.iNet product (pretty much neck and neck with the Spitz) that I have owned. Prepare to deal with all the frustrations particularly if trying to get it to properly work in repeater mode. I would recommend flogging all your devices on eBay or something and get yourself one decent and reliable router from the likes of Asus if you want to preserve your sanity. Best of luck.

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I also have an assortment of GL iNet routers and live a nomatic life, but I don’t own anything newer than an original Slate, and I’m not running 4.x on any of my routers.

All the new products are too big, and I just don’t have time for all the bugs in the 4.x firmware. I am configuring a Shadow as a new VPN server to leave with a family member next time I’m back in the USA, and after trying to set it up with the 4.3.7 firmware, I gave up and ended up going to generic OpenWrt 23.05 to get it setup the way I need it, as want it to support multiple VPN protocols and to have it live behind my family’s NAT router without them making any changes to their router.

Tonight I’m staying in a place where WIFI only is working if I hold my phone or PC out the window, so it’s really nice to have a USB150 on a long USB extension cable hanging out the window so I can type this while laying in bed. It would be really hard to do this with any of the newer GL iNet routers, as they are just too big to hang out a window on their USB power cable.

I would love to see a new small product. I would also like to see better firmware testing, as the upgrade from GL iNet 2.x to 3.x was also painful. I’m not holding my breath on either.

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hi guys! In my arsenal, I have 5 different Gl-Inet routers. Overall, I’m satisfied with all of them, except for the bugs in versions 4.X. I also have experience with two competing models, MT-3000 and AXT-1800. After numerous attempts to achieve a more stable Wi-Fi connection, I had to return my MT-3000 as I was dissatisfied with the stability and ability of the MTK chip. Apart from an older version of OpenWRT, I consider AXT-1800 to be a more acceptable option than MT-3000.

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Depending on your WAN, I’d suggest to put the Beryl AX as main router. The 2,5GBit would be an improvement to a fiber line.

I am using he Slate AX myself as WireGuard Endpoint, behind a Fritz!Box. But as the Box only supports 900 MBit/s, so the Beryl AX is already set up nearby, but I have not found time to switch … Two open points:

  • I need a 5 or 8 port AP nearby, because the Fritz!Box got 4 LAN ports and the Beryl AX only two. Or a few more 5m LAN cables.
  • I need to change 5 AP/Repeater in the house and redesign the VLAN, because f the proprietary AVM Mesh.

I really love my Shadow (external Antenna, but with small memory) as RV router for normal use and Slate Plus for power use when on land line

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You know what, I was at least slightly prepared for this, seeing as this is the exact experience I had trying to get the Creta working after upgrading it to 4.x.

So I swapped the Beryl AX in for the Creta, plugged it in, turned it on, fired it up … it worked. The bridge dropped a couple of times during the first day with 80MHz 5GHz channel. I reduced the channel bandwidth to 40MHz (to gain 3dB improvement in noise floor) and it’s been rock solid stable for days ever since, with zero intervention.

This is actually the best behavior I’ve had (so far) out of 4.x firmware on anything other than Slate AX, which also pretty much Just Worked for me.

I feel like 4.x can be highly inconsistent from device to device and even from install to install on the same device. Which can get quite frustrating. :man_shrugging:

Also, I’m realizing that in repeater mode, it pays to make sure all the details of security settings are identical between routers. That wasn’t made entirely clear to me (or I didn’t see it) and I find that having different security settings, or using WPA3 anywhere, can lead to severe problems with Repeater Mode.

FWIW, I ended up using WPA2-PSK with CCMP encryption (no TKIP and not ‘Auto’), selected in Luci after setting up everything else in the GLi interface, on both nodes and that’s how they seem the most stable (and fastest).

Anyway I suppose we’ll see if I manage to poke a house of cards in some way soon enough and break it, or not. In my experience once I manage to get the GLi devices stable, they mostly tend to stay that way.

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What I’ve found, starting from Shadow w/external antennae and using many of the products up thru the Wifi 5 and Wifi 6 travel routers, is that 802.11ac and 802.11ax are so much better than 802.11n, you might not even need to have the newer device outside the window to get the same level of connectivity :slight_smile:

I’d been torturing myself trying to get a directional dongle working with the GLi firmware for use in parking scenarios etc. I upgraded to a Slate Plus in the middle of that whole experiment and pretty quickly realized it could get a signal from as far away as I was testing at the time (let’s say 50 meters) with its built-in antennae. Where there would have been absolutely no chance with the older devices other than maybe a Shadow with a much slower link rate.

The devices new are definitely bigger and heavier, though in some cases staff have explained that you can’t really do more spatial streams etc in as small a physical package and using as little power as the old devices … it takes a bigger device and more power to shove all that data over the channel.

It would be really great to see a wifi 6 travel router with an emphasis on portability. I guess my level of “nomadicity” is low on the nomad scale, I tend to live in temporary environs but for longer periods so the bigger but better performing devices work well for me.

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Maybe a newer router would have done better, but both my phone and my PC which support newer WIFI standards did not work in this room until I put the USB150 out the window. The construction of the walls looked like concrete and rebar, which is good at blocking WIFI.

I live my life traveling, one suitcase and one small computer backpack for a year at a time, so size and weight really matters.

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