Going off slightly onto a diagonal tangent, but relevant due to Christmas shopping and the annual agony of trying to pick a new router before giving up in disgust... is there actually such a thing as a high-end router that DOESN'T seem to have page after page of 4- and 5-star reviews, sprinkled with 5-10% of 1-star reviews, and a pattern something like...
***** Awesome! Kicks ass! The greatest router I've ever had! Problem free, works flawlessly, and perfect in every way. {technical details}.
* Total garbage. Pure shit. 5GHz connections dropped after a day, and the router had to be rebooted to fix it.
***** (another overwhelmingly-positive review)
* Worked like a champ for {3-9 months}, then crapped out and left me in misery until I finally gave up and bought a new one.
***** (another positive review claiming it's a gift from ${deity})
* Junk. 2.5GHz works for 3 hours, then the router forgets how to route traffic between wireless and wired. 5GHz doesn't work reliably with Apple devices, and works reliably with Android devices only if you remove the network, reboot the phone, then add it as a new network.
* Terrible range and speed. I connected to this AP with my laptop from 5 feet away, and got barely 1mbps on an unused 5GHz channel. I disconnected it, reconnected my old $49 access point, and benchmarked 36mbps. WTF?!? ... and so on. Case in point: just about every dual-band 3-antenna router from ASUS, Netgear, Linksys, and Buffalo router that costs more than $150.
As far as I can tell, it basically comes down to:
* None of them have adequate heat-removal, especially if they're in a closet or cabinet of any kind. The electrolytic capacitor plague continues unabated 15 years later.
* Poor antenna impedance-matching, so RF gets reflected back into the radio module and progressively damages it.
* RF modules have real limits that nobody ever talks about, and certain permutations of features that just can't work, but because nobody from the manufacturer will ever come out and identify what those precise constraints are, end users are left to randomly flail about and wonder why certain things just don't work.
* Crap component quality pushed to the absolute limit of its design capabilities, then pushed 5% further, and guaranteed to fail eventually.
* Zero quality control besides "could we power it up enough to flash it"?