{"id":508,"date":"2016-03-21T14:12:04","date_gmt":"2016-03-21T03:12:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/raoulwegat.com\/?p=508"},"modified":"2023-09-05T07:39:56","modified_gmt":"2023-09-05T07:39:56","slug":"when-you-buy-tech-gear-on-aliexpress","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.raoulwegat.com\/?p=508","title":{"rendered":"When is a 1000Mb\/s router the same as a 100Mb\/s router?"},"content":{"rendered":"

When you buy it on AliExpress<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"Partaker Nice body. Shame about the BIOS.<\/p>\n

I’ve been researching gigabit routers for a while now. I’m moving soon to a fiber neighbourhood, and want a router that’s more than capable of handling serious speeds. More than anything, I want a router that’s future proof.<\/p>\n

So a while back I read an interesting article on Ars Technica<\/a> on the performance gains to be had by building your own router. The author used a fanless\u00a0Mini PC\u00a0made by AliExpress seller Shenzhen Inctel Technology Company<\/a>\u00a0[website<\/a>].<\/p>\n

I’m someone who likes to dabble and hack my own gear, so this approach appealed to me. Although I’d never used AliExpress before, the seller appeared to have a good rep, so I decided on\u00a0a fanless\u00a0Parataker Industrial Mini PC<\/a> with an Intel i3-4010u with 4gb ram and 32gb SSD for just under US$300\u00a0inc shipping. Most importantly, this unit had dual Intel 82574L 1Gb\/s lan ports, which play nice with Linux, my OS of choice.<\/p>\n

A week later the unit arrived. Physically the unit was\u00a0well built with the top of it a massive heatsink. I loaded FreeBSD\u00a0onto a USB drive and installed. That’s when I noticed something wasn’t quite right with the LAN ports.<\/p>\n

By “not quite right” I mean I pretty much unable to connect to anything, with upwards of 50% ping reply drops, and trouble connecting at 1000Mb\/s speeds. I swapped out my CAT5E for some new CAT6 and tested with two identical Netgear 8\u00a0port Gigibit switches \u2013 but the problem still remained.\u00a0One port was only able to connect at 100Mb\/s and the other was able to connect at 1000Mb\/s, but dropped packets like it was going out of style.<\/p>\n

I also\u00a0installed FreeBSD\u00a0to check with\u00a0another OS, and sure enough I was seeing the same. As a final test, I installed Windows 7. Same again.<\/p>\n

I sent a\u00a0nice note to the seller explaining the troubleshooting I’d done and requested they send another unit to swap over. I got no reply.<\/p>\n

It was then that I opened up\u00a0an AliExpress Dispute.<\/p>\n

The Dispute process asks that you submit “evidence”, so I put together a video showing how the LAN port lights on the faulty port failed to show 1000Mb\/s. In the video I use a new uncoiled 50cm CAT6 cable connected between the PC, with the gigabit switch sitting on top. Pretty simple really. There’s two lights above each port, if they both light up, you have gigabit speed. If only the left one lights, you have 100Mb\/s, if only the right one lights, you have 10Mb\/s.<\/p>\n

\"Ethernet Ethernet Speeds for Dummies<\/p>\n

But no, that was too complex for the AliExpress dispute team to understand, so they decided my “evidence” was not good enough and they refused my claim.<\/p>\n

Luckily, I had another three days to submit more evidence. How lucky was that!<\/p>\n

In the meantime, the seller finally replied to my initial message. First off they asked me reinstall Windows 7 (sigh). They then said there was a problem with the BIOS and to try a new one. So they emailed me a couple of links \u2013 one to some driver management software for Windows 7, and the other to Windows 7 drivers for the WLAN port. What, no BIOS update?<\/p>\n

So I then\u00a0headed into the PC’s BIOS to find that even\u00a0though the correct hardware was listed, if you went into the speed settings for each\u00a0port, the listed speeds in the select input maxed out at 100Mb\/s. There was no 1000Mb\/s listed. What I was potentially dealing with was a BIOS that hadn’t been properly paired to the motherboard.<\/p>\n

\"Look, Look, no gigabit setting.<\/p>\n

So I made another video of the BIOS, added\u00a0images of the sellers email and uploaded them into the AliExpress dispute portal.<\/p>\n

I finally got a reply saying that yes, they agreed the port only ran at 100Mb\/s, and they offered me a $75.79 refund if I kept the device, or a full refund if I paid for return shipping to the seller.<\/p>\n

Now, call me cynical – but at this point in\u00a0the process, the seller (and AliExpress) hadn’t exactly endeared me to them, so I didn’t exactly trust them “receive” my return shipment had I have done so.\u00a0Plus I was pissed that\u00a0I’d have to pay for the return shipping to China! So I replied to the AliExpress team asking why I had to pay for return shipping\u00a0when the goods\u00a0are faulty?<\/p>\n

The reply from AliExpress?<\/p>\n

Status of case: Complaint Closed
\nRefund amount: AUD 75.79 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0(without returning goods)
\nReason: As buyer and seller couldn’t reach an agreement, refund is issued.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Yes, WTF.<\/p>\n

But lucky me, I did have one final move \u2013 to file an appeal. So I did. And I repeated my previous question just in case they didn’t quite understand me. But alas no, the AliExpress reply was:<\/p>\n

Appeal Rejected
\nReason for rejection:As the goods still have certain value, we can only give you partial refund 75.79 AUD, hope you can understand. (Please kindly note the amount of partial refund depends on the defective and unmatched degree of the received product.)
\nWe sincerely feel sorry that you did not choose the second solution: return the goods for full refund. That’s why we closed the dispute with only partial refund of 20% to you.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Yep. I was dealing with mother flippin muppets.<\/p>\n

\"Mother<\/p>\n

But thankfully, as a first and last time AliExpress customer, the T&C of my credit card has a special muppet clause under Transaction Disputes called “Goods not as described”.\u00a0So I’ll leave it with my bank\u00a0to sort this one out.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When you buy it on AliExpress. Nice body. Shame about the BIOS. I’ve been researching gigabit routers for a while now. I’m moving soon to a fiber neighbourhood, and want a router that’s more than capable of handling serious speeds. More than anything, I want a router that’s future proof. So a while back I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-508","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.raoulwegat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/508","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.raoulwegat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.raoulwegat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.raoulwegat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.raoulwegat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=508"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.raoulwegat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/508\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":795,"href":"https:\/\/blog.raoulwegat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/508\/revisions\/795"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.raoulwegat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=508"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.raoulwegat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=508"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.raoulwegat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=508"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}