TP-Link Offers Outdated or No Firmware at All on 30% of Its European Sites

[LASER_oneXM]

TP-Link's European sites are falling behind when it comes to providing firmware updates, said Daniel Aleksandersen, a Norwegian technology expert, on Monday.

Aleksandersen says there's "a 29,63 % chance that you’re either getting outdated or no firmware at all by visiting your local TP-Link website."

The expert found this the hard way when he bought a TP-Link network repeater last month and tried to download the latest firmware version off TP-Link's Norwegian website, only to find out it was lagging two firmware versions behind the firmware versions available through the TP-Link Denmark and Sweden portals.

Only six European countries have access to the latest firmware
This discovery led Aleksandersen to start a research project on the firmware versions TP-Link was providing to users across its European sites for nine randomly-selected products. The results of this study are available in this OpenOffice spreadsheet.

According to Aleksandersen, only the Czech Republic, Finland, France, Italy, the Netherlands, and Romania have the latest firmware versions available for download on their reginal sites, for the nine products he selected.

The country with the fewest firmware updates available on TP-Link's regional sites was Switzerland, but this was because Switzerland only recently got on board with EU electronics standards and fewer firmware releases were available overall.

The expert pins the blame on TP-Link alone. This shouldn't have been an issue in the first place. EU electronics standards require hardware vendors to provide unified firmware packages that contain support for all EU languages and support for the radio frequency. Even countries not part of the EU have adopted the standard for conveniency's sake.

 

[lowdetection]

Experienced the same thing described, and I switched to dd-wrt

 

[SHvFl]

Have the same experience. They are relatively cheap here and no updates of any sort. Better to spend some more money and get something that can get a custom firmware like dd-wrt, tomato, etc.