I purchased in October an Archer MR600 router with great expectations in order to connect cheaply my remote mountain house to the internet and let me monitor and manage 24/7 stuff like my (to be bought) thermostat.

I am going to return the router tomorrow since it completely failed the unattended side of the thing. I would like to summarize here all the things that make this router unsuitable for my onw purposes.

1) The 24/7 unattended router availability is poor. The router frequently disconnects from the internet and is unable to reconnect on its own even when a nightly reboot is scheduled. The only way to make it work is a hard reset performed by unplugging the power. This is the killer missing feature for me.

2) When the router gets in this situation, it seems that the 4G status also affects the rest of the functions. This seems quite wrong to me since Wifi connectivity should not be affected.

3) As a special case of this, it looks like the main drivers behind this behaviour is actually not "missing 4G connectivity" per se, but just the DNS checks that are performed and that actually DEFINE whether 4G connectivity is present. Let me explain: the routers would sometime consider the 4G line disconnected although I was perfectly able to connect via my wireguard VPN to the raspberrypi behind it. This seems just plain stupid. A DSN check may be useful for diagnostic purposes but it should not affect the behaviour of the router.

4) For people like me, that use a provider that seem not support connection TO the client (Iliad in Italy as per another ticket) it would be really useful to provide a CLIENT VPN instead of a SERVER one. The way I had arranged to connect remotely and that let me gather some data about the router behaviour has been do connect an old raspberrypi to the lan ports and have a client wireguard connection established to the home router.

5) Support for wireguard would be very welcome. Clearly this would be just a nice to have point.

That's it for now. For the time being I will not buy a new router in exchange for this one and I will keep scanning the forum for updates. In any case, in my opinion the router issues are deeper than the simple band selection debacle. Still the box is nice and I assume the software bugs should be solvable not too difficultly.

Best regards