David-TP wrote

  @JJoe Hi, Nice to see you again. With all the respect, do you hope Deco supports local DNS resolution?

The DNS protocol is in reality quite complicated, and most consumer-level routers still wish to be easy to use for the average, non-technical user.

Thank you very much and best regards.

 

 

@David-TP yes, I do hope Deco will support local DNS resolution. It's not an uncommon feature. For example Google Nest wifi provides DNS for .lan domain (which ICANN has reserved specifically for such purpose), Linksys has it marketed as DNS Local Database, Apple products use the .local domain.

It doesn't really matter the complexity of the entire DNS protocol. TP-Link doesn't have to go out and write their own implementation as there are already many free open source implementations that TP-Link could add to the firmware. Software such as dnsmasq. And the functionality that users of home Deco solutions are looking for is quite simple. We just want to be able to use a name instead of an IP for their local devices. The only UX TP-Link needs to expose for this would be similar to the Address Reservation UX:

• A field to pick from a list of the reserved TLDs (or just hard card it ot .lan or .local)
• A list the records (maybe reserve router.lan for the Deco unit with the WAN connection)
• A '+' sign that takes the user to a list of the devices on the network, and when the user selects a device they're given a text field to type in the name

In fact, I personally would be fine with just adding a field to the configuration of each reserved address to specify a DNS name to go with the reservation. So there's no reason for offering this capability would make the product any less usable for the people who don't care about it, unless you think the address reservation feature that is already present makes your product unappealingly complicated. And adding local DNS resolution would only make the product more appealing to the people who do want that capability.

  @JJoe I agree with you, and this is something that I feel should be a part of Deco routers - especially given their price point! My Deco B95 was about 3x more than my previous mesh system, and about 5x the non-mesh router I had before that and both of those routers had basic DNS functionality. Tp-Link, please recognize this shortcoming in your products and add this. I almost avoided this product because of the lack of DNS, but I'm sure other people have or will when deciding which system to purchase.

When I directed this same question to TP-Link's Twitter accounts, I was almost impressed with how deliberately the people responding to me were pretending to not understand what I was asking for so that they could instead point to documentation on other features I wasn't asking about. And now I've come to find out that I can't even disable the inadequate DHCP server in router mode (I'm aware of switching to AP mode, but I would be losing NAT, parental controls, and isolated guest network).