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

This is a very good bit of kit, well priced and the functionality is great. I was debating buying another Draytek router for the load balance facility or try this out. I have a 5G router plus an ADSL landline, I had been using my Draytek router to balance between 5G and landline. I ended up finding that the TP link unit will load balance up to 4 lines. the good part with this unit is that you can use you ISP standard equipment and plug and play no issues if one drops or if one is performing better than the other, the load balance unit will take care of it. In a nut shell if you want redundancy from multiply internet connections this will save you a lot of time and money. the Draytek unit although it can do more will cost around 6 time the cost. being able to use other providers equipment to feed into the one route also provides greater resilience.

I think this router is great value for only £50. Even though I had to also buy a wireless access point for ~£40 for this setup to fully replace my ISP router, it still came in much cheaper than other "prosumer" routers with built in wireless. I just wanted to segment my network into two vLANs so I could host a minecraft server from my house on an isolated vLAN and then have all my personal stuff on the other. This router has done the job perfectly. I didn't need to use an omada controller or anything additonal, the built in router management page let me do everything needed, and it was (fairly) straightforward to set up everything up. The router just plugged straight into my BT ONT box and worked, I just had to enter in my ISPs credentials which Plusnet helpfully provides on a help page. Managed to replace my ISP router entirely. The router even supports geo-blocking in the ACL rules which was a surprise to me, I was able to set up a rule to only connections to my server from UK IP addresses, great!

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.

Great little box, fast and easy enough to setup. The backend connection with TpLink is good. I set everything up with a switch (TP-Link TL-SG3428 | 24 Port Gigabit Switch) - abit complicated for a novice but chatGPT helped me out. I then seen the Omada software to put on it and thats when things went bad... the Omada software took over, reset stuff, starting from scratch but not fully understanding the process or linking to the TPlink account - it was all abit confusing but got there in the end. I got a OC200 (an omada controller) to stop using my work PC as a software Controller - i aint gone fully to the OC200. We are a small office with 100mbps line so don't need anything crazy expensive and this is great and should support us for a few years while growing. with the 24 port switch, we got alot of Vlans between machines etc.

These are excellent devices - we have fitted them at a number of customer's premises, typically where a BT 2Wire Business Hub has been supplied. The BT devices do not feature a configurable firewall, so for example blocking by IP address cannot be set. The R470T+ works well in these environments, and handles double-NAT without issue. Throughput is adequate for a standard ADSL2+ connection, but we would suggest an upgrade to TL-R480T+ or TL-ER5120 for larger organisations or faster connections, as the stated throughput is higher. A much more powerful CPU is fitted to the TL-ER5120, and it's only about £150. Configuration is not Netgear easy, but can be quickly figured out. One tiny pitfall for those used to configuring more complicated devices - a NAT forwarding rule *doesnt* require a matching firewall rule. This router does not support syslog, nor is there much in the way of logging; only a basic system log, so again - consider a more powerful device if this is required.

I’ve gone through a few networking configurations over the years. I'm stuck on a slow FTTC connection (still waiting for FTTP) and originally ran a TP-Link VR900 in modem/router mode, later switching to a cheap TD-W9970 when the VR900 started playing up. For Wi-Fi, I used a Tenda MW6 mesh system (four nodes in total). The internet connection was rarely stable - daily dropouts were common, and Tenda’s performance felt limited. Neither the modem/router nor the mesh system could handle the sheer number of devices in my home (The house is fully networked with Excel Cat6, all terminating in a network cabinet in the dormer loft). I was on the verge of spending a fortune on Ubiquiti gear, but with a tight budget and assistance from ChatGPT, I decided to try Omada instead, and I’m glad I did. If Ubiquiti is the Apple of networking (polished, closed ecosystem, expensive), then Omada is like Android - flexible, capable, and much better value. I swapped the four Tenda MW6 nodes for two TP-Link Omada EAP653 UR access points (one wired, one wireless), added this ER605 gateway, and paired it all with an OC200 controller. I swapped the TP-link modem(s) for a 'used' DrayTek Vigor 130, which has been bulletproof. Since then, stability has been flawless and performance has improved across the board. Managing the network with Omada is night and day compared to my old setup. Device management is excellent - you can see real-time connections, monitor logs, review network attacks, and keep track of performance with ease. The Omada app makes this even better, letting you manage everything from anywhere. Whether Omada is better than Ubiquiti, I can’t say for certain, but considering I have a whole network upgrade for less than a Ubiquiti UniFi Dream Machine Pro, I'm happy with my choice.

I bought this not realising it was only 100mbps ports which makes it practically useless but I thought I'd give it the benefit of the doubt and use it ONLY for connecting my internet to two WAN connections (two x 70 mbps down, 18mbps up). After installing this unit I noticed the CPU was pegging almost 100% when using the UI - every now and then it would bug out and the CPU would remain at 100% so it'd need a hard reboot. Avoiding going into the UI was the only way to reduce the incidence, but it didn't stop the problem... I also noticed poor network performance since installing the device but I'd recently moved premises so the network layout was different - hence I blamed the move, not this device. So I updated the firmware as recommended by the manufacturer - seemed to improve it slightly but now the problems were happening more and more randomly rather than when visiting UI like the other versions. I noticed that since installing this router my domain controller was having difficulty determining which network it was part of, I had frequent disconnects while others were watching HD content and I was trying to play games - only to try to login to the UI of this router and noticed it's been completely unresponsive and in need of a hard reboot. Do yourself a favour and buy yourself a normal 5 port router that supports OpenWrt, then set up your vlans and mwan3 - you'll save way more cash and have a FAR better device.

I've got three of these now (1 for home and 1 each for 2 work sites). They've never missed a beat for my needs and offer a lot of flexibility in how they're configured (load balancing, failover, bandwidth throttling, VLAN, etc). However, I've discovered recently that they suffer from a significant limitation. The on-board DHCP server will not allow you to set a subnet / ip range that includes more than 255 addresses. This stopped me dropping it into a network on a 255.255.252.0 subnet (i.e. I couldn't use it without changing how the entire network was configured). This would MAYBE be acceptable if the limitation only applied to Class C addresses (although not really in my opinion), but it seems to apply no matter what class of address or subnet you use. Even the rubbish BT router that came free with my broadband allows this. Also, DHCP reservations don't persist between reboots so you can end up with 2 devices on the same IP for a while (2 hours is the default DHCP lease time). I've ended up working around the problem by assigning static addresses via DHCP that are outside of the available address range but it was a PITA. So there you have it. An otherwise great product with one major flaw.