I’ll introduce the WiFi router that I think is the best (and only) one I can recommend among the 4 WiFi routers I actually purchased after optical fiber installation.
Just to be clear, this is not affiliate marketing.
As I complained a bit on Twitter and elsewhere, it took about half a month from the optical fiber installation to finally being able to use it stably. Why? Because I was terribly unlucky with WiFi routers.
The first one I purchased was this one.
Well, it was my first optical fiber installation and WiFi setup, so it took some time, but I somehow finished the setup. Shall we enjoy high speed? About 8 hours passed and something strange happened.
Huh? Something’s wrong. It’s slow.
To cut to the chase, I couldn’t determine the cause (despite repeated inquiries), but the internet wouldn’t connect. It would connect, but sometimes disconnect. It would connect or not connect intermittently.
Well, this will be a complaint, but to summarize what happened:
- I contacted customer support by phone about 4 times
- Because it takes time to complete setting changes and firmware updates (several hours to 3 days), I ended up contacting support for over a week. (Efficiency is dead)
- For some reason, "try this" changed every time I called.
- It was never resolved
Support is good too. However, the support content is… (sweat) (good response, but no serious intention to solve)
So I gave up on this WiFi router and looked for the next one.
This one.
This one has very few features. It can’t even do port forwarding, and there’s pretty much nothing it can do. It’s for people who just want WiFi signals and LAN connection. For some reason, it has high ratings. When I actually asked support if it could do port forwarding, they said it was impossible.
Me: “So does that mean it’s a function that’s not normally used, so I don’t need to worry about it?”
Support: “That’s correct.”
Me: ”…”
This one has support that’s very… well, just like the router’s performance.
First of all, support itself doesn’t connect. If you call and see, you’ll understand, but it’s not even at the level of “please wait as we are busy” - they just hang up on you unilaterally… They don’t even let you wait.
If phone doesn’t work, how about email or chat? No, you can’t. Chat is always very busy too…
(It was a miracle that the phone connected. I called about 4 times at different times and it only connected once. The conversation above was from that time. I guess I used my luck in a weird place…)
However, this WiFi router worked normally. So I used this one for a while.
But the other day, I suddenly thought, I still want to do port forwarding… so I tried searching for WiFi routers on amazon.com as a last resort. And then…
I found a good one.
This WiFi router has many features.
- VPN
- Optical fiber compatible
- 4 optical-compatible wired ports
- Extremely good signal (connects even 10 meters away from home. At least stronger than the above two models.)
- Port forwarding possible
- I'll leave the rest to the manual.
By the way, this WiFi has over 2000 reviews on amazon.com and is quite excellent.
There are many affiliate blogs explaining WiFi, but most people probably haven’t actually used them. I actually bought them and reviewed them including the reality of support. I hope this helps.
Oh, the 4th one? Actually, I bought two Buffalo WiFi routers. As support also said, the possibility that it was defective couldn’t be ruled out. I returned both of them though.
Now even if they prepare one that works properly, I won’t even notice it.