Robert Ontiu

I have a 5 year old WiFi range extender that has been working nice and well.

Mid May, TPLink, through their mobile app, prompted me to do a firmware upgrade for my device. I accepted. A couple of minutes later, my device was bricked and in an unrecoverable state.

I contacted their support, explained the situation. They told me that it is unlikely they pushed a firmware upgrade because the latest version dates back to 2021. They told me it is likely hardware failure and pointed me to buy a new one.

Over the following weeks, I have been in talks with Rickard, a person from support, providing them with app logs and information. They concluded that the app did indeed attempt to download a firmware upgrade, but it is unlikely that the upgrade damaged the device. They suggested that it is a hardware failure and they will not further address the issue.

I took matters into my own hands. I bought a 30kr serial debug adapter, soldered it onto the motherboard, booted into the device to find exactly what I expected: all hardware working and a corrupted filesystem partition - the exact partition that a firmware upgrade writes to. I installed OpenWrt and the device is now working, free from the incompetence of TPLink software engineers.

As a software engineer myself, I acknowledge that accidents happen sometimes. That is acceptable. However, a respectable company owns up to their mistakes. I do not know if this was deliberate obsolesence (I doubt it was), but it was incredibly shameful for a company of this size to treat a customer like that, after flagging a critical issue in their system.

I'm never buying their products ever again.

I can already see here all this bragging about being an "online company" only. Make no mistake, BMC Leasing is cutting costs by oferring you a much worse, much tedious and more frustrating experience.

My father has been trying to lease a car from them for almost a month. We have initially reached out to them with some small questions about delivery. They take several days to reply to simple questions, and when you do decide to express your interest on a car, they just ghost you until the car goes off market.

Hands down, our experience with trying to lease a car with BMC Leasing can be described as to chasing your own shadow. They have no direct reservation form, they take ages to reply if they even reply at all, and they cannot be reached by the phone. This has got to be the most unserious company I've ever had the unpleasant experience to deal with.

And, worst of all, there is the delivery cost. They charge 1.250 DKK delivery but they ONLY deliver to København Hovedbanegård and Høje Taastrup. Combined with the fact that you cannot opt out of it, this has got to be the most obnoxious, shameless fee they could have ever mustered.

To give you a comparison, we have shifted to privateleasing.dk, filled out the form on Friday, today the car is confirmed and will be delivered AT HOME in a couple of days.

Don't bother with these guys, you will save yourself time and frustration if you simply go with competitors.