I used to run junk routers from overseas as APs at home. Nothing really wrong with that, but recently I noticed the AP at one of my places started losing signal—my guess is one of the antennas died. So with that, and the Double 11 sales landing at the same time, I decided to swap them out. My main router is a software router, so these were bought to be pure APs anyway; all they needed was good wireless specs. That’s how I ended up looking at two new Redmi models. So I bought both, one AX5 and one AX6, to replace the two junk ones.

The Phicomm K2 router is a fairly controversial product.

The NETGEAR R6300V2 is a good router. Plenty of people say the first thing you should do after buying one is 1. I have no idea what that Merlin thing even is. I’ve always used Linksys and never touched NETGEAR’s higher-end stuff, but I finally picked up an R6300V2 during a JD sale a while back. Not for home, though — it’s for work, where it serves as a plain AP. The network situation at work is a bit messy. First, the office has around 20-plus phones and tablets that need to connect wirelessly, plus 5–6 laptops. So the office Wi-Fi has some requirements. The office has three ISP connections coming in: one China Unicom (Netcom), one China Mobile, and one China Telecom. Telecom has the most bandwidth, Netcom the least, and Mobile sits in the middle. But for certain reasons you probably know, the best route for “scientific browsing” is Netcom, while Telecom is fastest for domestic sites. Mobile is the awkward one — not good enough for either. The gateway router has an address table that decides which exit to use based on the ISP address ranges in it. That setup doesn’t satisfy me. I need to specify the network exit more bluntly.

For years I ran TP-Link routers, until I got sick of having to reboot them all the time. In 2011 I bought a Linksys E4200 and, paired with an RE1000, covered the whole house wirelessly. Then came four-plus years of peace. Honestly, apart from power outages I basically never touched those two routers, and they almost never crashed—only now and then a loose WAN port needed re-plugging. A few days ago, though, I found this router was finally done. First the ports wouldn’t come up, then config changes wouldn’t save, and it stayed that way after a reset; flashing firmware threw an error. That’s when I realized the thing was probably dead. Dead means replace. Linksys hasn’t been Cisco’s for years, but I still have a good impression of them, so I picked up a Linksys WRT1900AC plus RE4000w to replace the E4200 and RE1000.

The internet situation at my workplace is pretty unusual… Theoretically speaking — I mean theoretically, according to the leadership management regulations — every internet user in the entire institution should be rate-limited, with video and downloads throttled, and stock trading and remote connections prohibited. Not even our department is exempt. Except most of those rules were written by me… so my own IP sits outside the rules. Yeah, that’s against the regulations, but I’m the type who doesn’t give a damn about the leadership, and a fair number of the institution’s higher-ups have their IPs in the unrestricted group too. But the other guys and girls in my department are total bootlickers. Every day they see the boss and look ready to kneel; the moment he’s gone they’re ready to tear him apart. One face in front, another behind. They want to secretly watch videos and trade stocks at work, but when I offered to move their IPs into the unrestricted group, they shook their heads and said they didn’t dare.

I’d been meaning to pick up a router to flash OpenWRT on, mainly to mess around with bypassing the GFW. But the Linksys E4200 at home ran more stably on stock firmware, so I never got around to it and just hung a Raspberry Pi off it as a gateway instead. That worked fine. Then a while back I saw a router going for 19 yuan with free shipping, and I couldn’t hold back. Twenty yuan — that’s nothing. How much does a meal cost anyway?