TP-Link Load Balance Broadband Business Router with Up to 4 WAN Ports (TL-R480T+)

I bought this router after trying and returning a router from a different manufacturer. This router was £40 more expensive and really. I should have known..."You get what you pay for"You do need to know your way around IPv4 and/or IPv6 protocols and general knowledge about how routers work to configure this device correctly but if you do then it's a trivial affair to get it configured.In total, I configured the router attached to a laptop then plugged it into the actual network to start its life routing packets in around 20 minutes from unboxing to up and running.I've used this router to replace an old Windows machine with 2 Gb NIC's in it that I have been using as a router for years and at the time of writing, it's been in operation for 36 hours.My first impressions are that it's fast and very configurable.There are a couple of minor niggles with it but they're not massive.1. Whilst the web interface works on all the major browsers, it seems most reliable in the latest version of Firefox. In Chrome and Edge the web UI can hang sometimes. I'm assuming there's a bit of JavaScript in the UI that Firefox handles better than the other browsers.2. The Secure Certificate that is used is "Self signed" at the Certificate Authority level so appears as "untrusted" in all browsers when accessing the router for management over SSL. Whilst this isn't a major problem, it just seems like TP-Link skimped on getting a proper certificate or bothering to register as a Trusted Certificate Provider. Either option on their part would have done.Now the issues are out of the way, here's the positives...In terms of operation and performance, this router is more than adequate for any network that needs to support up to 1Gbps network speeds. I'm using this with a Virgin Media account with their "router" in "Modem only" mode because they have support back doors so I use this router as a way to firewall them out of my network.Our Virgin account is currently restricted to the 200/20Mbps Down/Up package. Using Speedtest.net when this router is in place, we get the expected speeds without fail which is more than can be said for the router we bought and returned a couple of weeks ago.As this is aimed at the SMB router market, there's no WiFi built in. For us this isn't a problem as we have a fully 1Gbps wired network in our house and a couple of dedicated Wireless Access Points which are dotted around the house for the best wireless coverage we can get.The device has an adequate DHCP server built in but the UI leaves a little to be desired with some of the "Advanced features" of the DHCP server being described by their basic names such as "Option 60" which you'd have to look up if you didn't know what it meant...Other features I've made used of are the Dynamic DNS which supports a few providers including DynDNS which is the provider I use. Configuration of that service is simple enough and works correctly and I'd expect the other services supported to work in a similar manner.Overall, I'm really pleased with this device and can see that once it is configured (which is quite easy to do), you can leave it in situ and never need to touch it again.

This device is brilliant! If like me you don't have fast broadband services running to your home then this device is brilliant for aggregating multiple accounts. I use it to aggregate copper delivered Sky, Plusnet and 4G and 5G wifi routers from 3UK.You will need an sfp to ethernet adaptor but other than that it is all good. It is a rock solid device and up time was 6 months from when I bought it - it did overheat and crashed not very gracefully in the current UK heat wave (room with ER7206 in hit 30 degrees celsius) - had to factory reset - so definitely take a backup of your settings.Aggregation of multiple ISP accounts seems too good to be true and it is to a certain extent - if you aggregate (load balancing at an individual ip packet level) across all ISP WAN connected devices you will get the aggregate speed the only drawback is some web services do not allow packets from multiple ip addresses (iplayer will sometimes complain about this for example) - if this is a deal breaker you can always set the load balancing options to application optimized routing which will resolve the problem (or use a vpn client if you can on your connected device).It can also act as your DHCP server (even on v1.0 of the hardware) - you'll find it in Network->LAN then click on the Operation notepad icon - in there you can setup how DHCP works. It is very fast and reliable DHCP server. Multiple vlans are also supported if you want to segregate your local network devices.For such a low price this device is miraculous! Even if you have a single fast connection get this to aggregate a backup link!

I recently added a 4G LTE modem to supplement my somewhat slow ADSL service and I bought this router to share the load between the two modems with the hope of having a faster internet experience. The router does indeed balance the load between the two WANs but it does it without much sophistication. It does not track connection speed and use spare bandwidth intelligently. It is simply a 50:50 chance as to which WAN gets used to establish a new connection. Also the manual claims that you can check the 'use bandwidth based routing' option and then you can control the relative amount of traffic on each port by entering 'bandwidth' numbers. That does not appear to work. I've tried various settings and over a few days it makes no difference. The split in traffic is always 50:50.All that said, this is a very inexpensive router and you can't expect too much for this sort of price. There are routers out there that have all kinds of sophisticated algorithms for proper load balancing but they cost ten times more. Load balancing aside, the router does have very useful options for routing specific devices to one port in preference. Power consumption is tiny (1W) so isn't going to cost much to run as an 'always on' device.Initially I did have a bit of difficultly setting up until I realised that one of my modems was configured for the same subnet as the load balancer. So make sure the devices attached to the WAN ports use different subnets. After that everything just works and the remaining set up easy and intuitive. It has worked reliably for the month I've had it - no drop outs, no need to reboot.So overall moderately pleased but it hasn't radically changed the internet experience by optimally utilising my ADSL & 4G bandwidth. Internet performance is a bit of a lottery but overall slightly better.