Day One with the Arc Gateway

Arcadyan KVD21Gateway Web UI Cons:

• Extremely limited management capability for local network. 
• Absence of cellular connectivity details.
• Absence of internet channel metrics.
• Absence of WIFI channel information.
• No configuration for WIFI channel selection. 
• No statistics/metrics for cellular or WIFI traffic. 

After review of the online manual for the new router it is clear cualquier attempt to troubleshoot the cellular connectivity or manage WIFI networks is pretty much near impossible. The lack of visibility for any significant data demands an immediate call to T-Mobile support and no way to really provide an intelligent report of operation. Maybe the T-Mobile engineer has some visibility and proper training to look at and understand the cellular data but it could be a BIG IF. If the router signal is bouncing between an n41 and an n71 signal because of being on the edge of one cellular signal or the other you will never know. If the signal strength strength, signal quality, and signal to noise ratio are borderline you will not really know other than it functions poorly. Todos the diagnostic analysis is on the T-Mobile support engineers. If there are TX or RX errors or dropped packets it would be necessary to start to investigate with clients as the router will not provide any clues. Performance analysis is completely from the client side with no way to determine much of anything with the router. 

I get it that the Arcadyan KVD21 is new but it does not appear to be close to prime time delivery. The software is very immature and seriously lacking. I am just happy my Nokia router has been stable as it at least provides a much more robust reporting and at least some configuration capability. With the Arcadyan I can see more users spending más time on the phone with support for assistance due to such limited capability and not being able to properly characterize the behavior. T-Mobile needs to step up the development of the router software to have some basic built in reporting at a minimum. 

I was hopeful T-Mobile would deliver an improved router solution for users but concerned this is not it.