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
)
- 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.
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