Tenda MX12-3 Tenda AX3000 Mesh System Nova MX12-7

it's a shame because wireless range and quality is really good and the interface isn't bad, however I'm not sure if it's bad hardware or bad firmware but these things are ridiculously and infuriatingly unreliable. it's not bad with a capital B, it's bad with a capital BAD.first, I have one unit that just randomly decides to disconnect itself from the network for no particular reason. literally. it's in my office room connected to nothing but my nas that sits idle 99% of the time as well as my office desktop and network printer which both are off 99% of the time. periodically I'll try to access the nas or Windows will give me an alert for file history being disconnected too long and I'll open the router portal and that unit will be grayed out on the tree. sure enough go into the office and the light is blinking green. power cycling the unit fixes it but this happens SEVERAL TIMES EVERY SINGLE DAY.second, the 2 secondary units will just crash or something when faced with too much traffic. how much is too much? a single 1080p youtube video apparently, in some cases. ill be watching a video, then suddenly the wifi will drop out, i look over and the unit is blinking red. after a bit it will reset itself and reconnect, but this is still 2-3 minutes after failure so its not a short quick interruption. same for the other one, i tried to hook up and run a pihole (network wide adblocker) just to try it out and that unit would CONSTANTLY crash 2-3 times AN HOUR due to the entire network having to be routed through that unit to go through the raspberry pi.finally, the primary unit will also itself just randomly decide "im out" and do the blinking red light. this kills the entire network for the house because even if the other 2 units (by some miracle) are fully functional at the time because nothing can connect to the local network anyway. this is the rarest issue of the 3, but still shouldnt happen in the first place.note that this is with an entirely ethernet backhauled setup too, no wireless to wireless bridging, which makes this all the more damning.before i bought the mx12 ive been running a mishmash of a couple entirely different routers (a dlink and 2 tplinks) that all just said the same SSID and password and disabling dhcp on all but one of them, effectively meshing them. i ran that setup for over 5 years, and it worked perfectly. seriously, i had probably 95-98% uptime that entire time, there were almost no problems ever. even going room to room the handoff between routers was seamless. i only upgraded because i wanted wifi6 and i didnt want to spend 300-400 bucks on multiple mid tier routers. clearly i should have.