TP-Link N600 Wireless Dual Band Router

TP-Link TL-WDR3500 Review In a nutshell: Rating scale 1-5 Stars USB Print server function = * (1 Star) Linux compatibility as advertised = * (1 Star) Phone Technical support = * (1 Star) Product potential not tested features = *** (3 Stars) Pros: So far I haven't found any for the product out of the box. Other then that this product is possibly a reasonably priced piece of hardware to gut the firmware, and install some alternative wireless device management OS like openwrt on. Cons: 1# This wireless router with a usb port absolutely does not have a print server function as advertised. More details on this below. 2# This product does not fully support Linux as advertised!! More on this later. 3# The 24x7 support line may actually tell you that they cannot hear you and ask you to email support and then hang up. I don't know if this is legit or not but it has happened to me about 5 times while trying to resolve various problem with the setup of this product. 4# The USB printing function does not work over the wireless. You must be plugged into the router via a cable to print! 5# The special driver setup program seems unstable and crashes. The long of it: Qualification: Let me inject here by declaring that I am an IT professional. I have over a decade of experience with various products ranging from Printer servers that I have deployed to push out automatic installs of printers to thousands of clients to complex international network setups. I am not trying to sound like a Jack donkey, but I do want to qualify that there is no lack of knowledge backing the technical opinions listed below. Disclaimer: I purchased this product for the sole purpose of functioning as a wireless print server to be able to sit in a corner and do nothing but provide access to a USB laser printer (Samsung CLP-300) from the rest of my wireless network devices in my home. So it may vary well be a viable product if you have other intentions for it's use. #1 USB print Server Ultimately this device is not a print server. There a several well accepted standards for network printing to print servers that enable pretty much any device out there the option to comply with standards and be able to print to network print servers so long as the device has a print driver that is compatible with the printer itself. This device does not comply with network printer server concepts at all. If I had to characterize how it works, it is more of a USB port replication over cabled ethernet concept. It seems to virtualize a USB port on the printing client and then sling that data stream over to the USB port. Mind you this is to some degree speculation based on observations I made while setting it up. The reason this is so important and should not be acceptable is that the required software to use the printing function of the TL-WDR3500 will actually interfere with your otherwise functioning USB drivers. In my case after I finally got a test computer to print through this device I disconnected from the TL-WDR3500 physically and found that I could no longer print to my USB printer via a USB cable as had worked flawlessly before. It required purging the TP-Link special application in order to restore normal USB function back to my device at least as it pertained to my USB printer function. I chose to not test further. #2 Linux support This is simple. The product advertised specs include Linux. When you call support and ask how to get the print function working on linux they will likely tell you that the only way is to install a particular Window and Mac only software. If you ask for enough info to create your own work around for this given your need for Linux support per the advertised specs they may actually launch into a broken record loop and repeat themselves verbaitum. In other words I was not able to even get them to acknowledge the source of my expectations and it felt that they were very aware of this. The ultimate irony is that this product itself seems to be running linux as it's OS. The box ships with a classic Open source GNU license notification tucked in the packaging and if you take a look at the ping diagnostic output from the TL-WDR3500 web interface it is identical to a standard linux kernel ping utility output. Again just speculation but it's ironic to me. #3 24x7 support Mind you my hold times have not been unbearable but if you take the time to call support you might experience something you have not ever before. This was, for me at least, a first. While on hold, approximately ever 20 or 30 seconds you are told to press 1 or you will be disconnected. It doesn't stop as long as you are on hold! So forget setting your phone down to multi-task, because if you miss 1 of the 2-3 times per minute that you are required to press #1 on your phone you will be hung up on. I didn't actually test this by pressing my luck, but I am going on what the system itself tells you while you are on hold. Really?!!! Who does that??? #4 wireless and the USB print function After giving up on ever getting Linux to work for the print function, I decided that it would only be fair to review this if I at least tried it in the sanctioned Winblows 7 setup. Note that there was great difficulty in even getting this to work, see #5 below. But once I had borrowed a windows 7 laptop from someone to test, installed the extra bloat-ware required by TP-Link, and finally gotten a successfully printed test page, I made the deal breaker discovery. This setup will not print over wireless. That's right I had the software setup per the instructions which I did note as odd that they specifically instructed you to do the setup using a cable plugged into the router, and I was printing. I pulled the plug out and enabled my wireless and the special software went blank. You don't have the option to scan for the TL-WDR3500, and you don't have the option to manually key it it. It's just not an option. I even rebooted the borrowed laptop to see and nothing. You can't print. I then disabled my wireless and hooked an ethernet cable directly to the TL-WDR3500 again to bring this full circle and within about 1 second of getting my IP address the device populated into the list and I was again able to print a test page. Now 2 things on this... first no all modern laptops even have an ethernet cable. If a protocol is IP capable, you should be able to make it work over any IP network wireless or other wise. Reliability issues not withstanding of course. The second thing is that to me 90% of the purpose of having a USB port on a wireless router is to access what is plugged into that port from your wireless devices. Is this a no-brainer or what? If I have to transport my laptop across the room and hook up a cable to print, why can't that cable simply be the USB cable?? What's the difference #5 special driver install This one is short. To install the required software for print, I had to reboot the loaner laptop 2 times and launch the install a total of 4 times to get it to complete due to the fact that it crashed mid-install 3 times. Yes this might have been caused by something on the laptop that isn't quite right but it seems to align with the overall experience of this product so I include it as part of my experience. There are so many other features of this product that I have not tested but since printing is why I purchased it and it fails miserable on many accounts I will not waste further time testing this product in an out of the box setup. If you do decide to purchase this item, best of luck.