Somebody needs to start telling the truth about the current state of wifi vendors,
products, etc. As you know the real truth can only be told anonymously and
posthumously.
It is nearly impossible to find a good wifi manufacturer. There are a few,
very few really good dealers out there. I come to this conclusion after weeks
of searching for a good driverless client adapter bridge, but it applies to
nearly all wifi products.
Go to most ANY page with user reviews and you will invariably NOT BE ABLE to
FIND ANY ONE PRODUCT that 90% of what are obviously well skilled knowledgeable
end users rate as good or excellent. They ALL have major problems. And most
mfgs. offer NO TECHNICAL SUPPORT OF ANY WORTH. One exception I found to this
was a Belkin product which is known for making quality products, but which
are often expensive and not very versatile.
One good dealer I found was netgate.com
Try contacting the mfgs. They will mostly send your email to dev/nul (the wastebasket)
and are exceedingly poor at designing easily accessible web pages (often due
to competitive paranoia). But mostly whether by email or phone, whether you
have bought the supposedly guaranteed product or not you will get zip or even
worse wrong information. Their tech support depts. must be paid $5 and recruited
from homeless camps. The companies put out drivers that do not work and crash
systems and their other information on their products is sketchy or false.
Go ahead and try to find good products, with good support it is an exercise
in futility.
And then there is this group, inhabited by techno nerds who really do not want
to help anyone new to the field, which is MOST of the people trying to use
wifi. They often ignore requests for help and/or reply in obtuse terms which
the objective observer can only interpret to mean they either do not know themselves
or are purposely trying to confuse. They think because they have been around
awhile that others have to pay homage to their so called expertise, which means
often they just learned it yesterday themselves, the field is progressing so
fast and really has not many universally accepted standards or terminology.
It is the blind leading the blind mostly.
Things will evolve over time. All the shitty mfgs out there will go belly up,
unless they have bill gates clones on board. And all the crap dealers with
their bogus (theft) restocking charges for defective products, their lies and
shipping mistakes will also fold and with God's or Satan's help hopefully there
will be a few good companies to choose from. It is amazing that the stupid
American consumer puts up with this bullshit.
Until then I strongly suggest that prospective buyers check out the products
before they buy THOROUGHLY. Do NOT rely on dealer and/or mfg. promises-they
are often false. DO NOT assume you will get tech support because you usually
will not.
Buy LOCALLY from a store that has a MONEY back return policy and that you can
SUE locally if they do not stand behind their warranties. The net is a mostly
a place of frauds and deceptive practices these days-a kind of fairy land where
the customer gets no respect and is often led down a primrose path by companies
that spend most of their energies in marketing ala Billy Boy's dishonest strong
arm tactics. (MS is proof the BIG if anything equates to poor quality and poor
service).
To all the flamers out their, I'm not going to bother answering you, so FUCK
you in advance.
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