I bought this to replace an older TP-Link device that I was very happy with (a TP-Link TL-R480T+ bought in 2011), but I'd gotten faster internet and the old machine only did 100mbps. So I got this, thinking it'd be just as nice and useful as the old one.Boy was I wrong.So first off, they replaced the simple HTML UI of their older models with some JavaScript SPA B.S., which means you can't bookmark anything. You have to wade through the menus every time to find what you're looking for.Good luck with that.The menus are counterintuitive, with items distributed seemingly at random under different headings.For example, do you want to configure a virtual server or port forward? Well, you can, but good luck guessing what heading to find it under. Is it "Firewall"? "Transmission"? "Behavior Control"? "Services"? "Preferences"? "Network"?I don't know, actually. I just tried clicking on all of those to see if I could remember where it was. Nothing listed under ANY of those options looks like it's anything to do with port forwarding or virtual services. Just like the time before this, I had to look in the reference manual to find that it's under "Transmission > NAT". I guess you can say that those are a kind of network address translation, but why make such a basic thing so hard to find? There is a lot of stuff like that, buried as tabs instead of having their own menu items.The UI annoyances go much deeper than that, though. When I first got it, I tried to set it up to match the old router's static IP assignments, netmask, and various other things. But it wouldn't let me do rather a lot of it because its initial configuration was for a different IP/netmask. It would've been one thing if it either allowed you to apply the setting changes all at once after entering them, or if it told you upfront you couldn't do it that way. Instead, it allowed me to enter dozens of IP assignments, then threw them all away when I tried to apply them. (The import feature for IP assignments was also fairly rubbish - had to read some support tickets on their site to figure it out, because I'm not the only one who had problems with it.)Thankfully, the unit has been as functional as its UI is annoying. I haven't had to touch it after the initial setup, and it's been working fine a few months now. And to be fair to the vendor, it's pretty obvious this was intended to be remote-managed through their special hardware+software rather than through its Web UI. But for somebody who wants to use this as a standalone unit and not install a bunch of apps, the experience was painful every step of the way, especially when compared to my OLD router from the same manufacturer!
