My review of the Luma wifi router. Month later.

I’ve written review on Amazon for Luma wifi router couple days after I received it — it was two star review, due to many features were and still are missing, which are essential.

I decided to keep product for slightly longer to see if I can change my mind, and see if there are any software updates which would fix pretty long list of issues I had with this device, in addition to very long pre-order shipping thing. I joined pre-order craze much later, than others, so I won’t cry about long-long pre-order time — I’ve got mine within three months of placing my order in late August 2016.

Setup was almost flawless — only problem I ran into is come up with wifi network name (hey, guys, you could have come up with suggestions!); another flaw, was something with lights as they weren’t working exactly as application suggested to.

Then I’ve got wifi everywhere where it was missing, including outside of the house. Speeds were much better than single Airport Express I have.

While I had Luma, they added support for static DHCP leases — one of the complaints I had originally. Most important feature for me — bridge mode isn’t available and, according to their twitter response — “there are not any near term plans for introducing bridge mode luma as that would be counter productive to the security and parenta(l control)”.

Here is what I like and dislike about the router:

Pros:
 — Increased throughput for wifi devices on my network;
 —Dramatically increased wifi coverage.

Cons:
 — No bridge mode;
 — IP addresses for devices on DHCP is limited to 192.168.xxx.21 and 192.168.xxx.254. And this is not configurable;
 — No way to change wifi network from 192.168.xxx.xxx to something different (What if prefer 10.0.0.0/8);
 — No MAC address filtering;
 — No way to configure custom NTP server and DNS server addresses for DHCP server;
 — No way to turn off parental control;
 — Parental control redirects to external website, which can leak my internal data to the manufacturer.

There is no reason for me to keep these devices — I need to have my desktops and mobile devices on the same network. I can’t work otherwise. So I made a decision to return these devices back. I’ll miss wifi coverage, but will investigate other options. I still think 300–400–500 for three wifi access points is way too expensive. I’ll give a try to other products which are showing up on market.