I got tired of the crap that is offered at Best Buy so I purchased an Almond+ at what is a competitively premium price on Amazon based on the feedback. I am a system engineer by trade, but not an expert in WiFi per se, so I thought my experiences might be a good balance of technical proficiency and ignorance to help balance your feedback.
My primary workstation is a monster with built-in SSD RAID1 + RAID 10 running VMware Workstation on RHEL 7 where I do most of my development. This system is hardwired into a NETGEAR GbE switch whihich uplinks to the router. Also on this switch is a Synology NAS.
I also have a Windows 8.1 laptop which I use for light web browsing and media streaming, PS4, an iPhone, and an iPad connected via WiFi, all via 2.4GHz (my goal was range not throughput). The iPad is my primary 'casual' device for internet access and media streaming.
One more note: I live an hour outside of Denver in the mountains, and rely on Exede satellite for internet connectivity. However I have lived here for years and am familiar with the latency satellite introduces. My feedback is based on 2yrs+ with Exede on a Netgear WNDR3400 router (the latter was replaced with the Almond+).
Overall the Almond+, which I flashed to the latest GA firmware within an hour of unboxing, is awesome. That said, there are some rough edges.
PROs:
* Easy out of the box setup without any Windows-based setup utilities or odd subnets. While the default IP/netmask was not in-scope with my network this was easy to change using the LCD interface. It locked up while rebooting after the change, but I simply reset power and it worked from then on out. Very cool.
* Excellent quality of service for streaming media, except when the unit 'burps'.
* Rich configuration via Advanced OpenWRT panel. Not as rich as some Buffalo routers which offer DD-WRT, but still very powerful.
* Excellent range.
CONs:
* Frequent dropouts (WiFi and wired). I call this a 'burp' and impacted all my connections to the router intermittently every couple of days to several times a day. I cannot tell if it is a cumulative throughput issue, but I can say that it affects both wired and wireless connections and does not seem to impact previously established streaming connections. In other words, I have never had an existing stream interuupted, but manually re-establishing a stream when the system 'burps' always fails. When this happens I must either wait 5-10 mins or reboot the router.
* Fragmented interface: While the basic and advanced OpenWRT interfaces are easy to traverse, it is the overlap with the LCD that is lacking. You can only update the router firmware automatically via the LCD, using an obscure interface. The web interface cannot detect updated firmware, let alone download or update it. This is just an example; the whole basic vs OpenWRT vs LCD interfaces seem to be a series of independent strovepipes with inconsistent overlap. For example, in addition to the issue with firmware updates, you can only reboot the router from the OpenWRT panel, but this does not render properly (due to dropdown) on an iPad.
* Limited LCD utility: My biggest pet peeve is the fact that the LCD has not been put to better use. While useful for ad hoc and out-of-box configuration it really fails to live up to its biggest potential in that it offers *NO* real-time performance statistics. The LCD is such an obvious place to put configurable I/O graphs or throughput leaderboards that I struggle to understand why my only option as of now is a clock (which is a *new* feature). As excited as I was to receive my Almond+ I was really disappointed by the LCD UI. And since this is a flagship feature it was hard not to be bummed on the product as a whole.
In the end, when asking myself if I should RMA the unit I decided not to send it back. Aside from my desire to support an underdog in the market I appreciate the fact that Securifi has been active in their forums without the usual PR filter. I do however wish that they would be more open about the development roadmap; as it stands I have a semi-stable router I can live with but would really appreciate knowing what is on the release schedule so I can limp to recovery.
Bottom line:
Would I recommend Securifi to my Dad? Not yet.
Would I buy another Securifi router? Yes, but only if I have another vendor/model to fall back on.
Am I hopeful that the above two assessments will change? Absolutely. I dig the direction Securifi is chasing, and want to be a loyal customer!
