Linksys WRT-3200ACM Rumors - The Big Blue Router hits Wave 2

[sfx2000]

Starting to see some rumbles about a WRT Wave 2 over on the DDWRT/OpenWRT forums...

Board Name - Rango
RAM/Flash - 512/256 (flash is a bump up)
CPU - Armada 88F6825 @ 1.866 GHz

Unknown what wireless chipsets - features supposedly are VHT160 and MU-MIMO - however, I suspect it will be a Marvell solution -- 88W8964 - info here

And 4*4:4 - the numbers make sense for "AC3200" - AC2600 for 4 stream 5GHz, and N600 for 4 stream 2.4GHz (wide channels)...

Maybe they'll stop trying to do non-standard stuff in 2.4GHz this round, and just do 11n there - MCS 24 thru 31...

Don't need proprietary stuff there (e.g. Turbo/NitroQAM)...

Rest is pretty much same - USB2/USB3/eSATA/4*1GB Ethernet on the LAN side - so I would expect similar performance on the routing/storage side, which has always been a strong point of the WRT family...

 

[RMerlin]

I saw Brainslayer commit support for this model to DD-WRT in past few days. Since the WRT line is committed to being opensource-friendly, I assume it will be Marvel-based.

 

[sfx2000]

I saw Brainslayer commit support for this model to DD-WRT in past few days. Since the WRT line is committed to being opensource-friendly, I assume it will be Marvel-based.

concur... and makes sense with the rest of the board support package - Linksys has been pretty loyal with Marvell over the lifespan of that product line.

 

[FattysGoneWild]

I really really hope the next WRT wave completely bombs. They deserve it. Nothing but empty promises and lies. They completely left many WRT1900AC V1 owners like myself in the dust. Those lazy asses never even fixed the remaining major bugs. Got their money and ran with it releasing revision after revision. That is always their answer instead of firmware fixing. They can get bent. Linksys routers will never be in my household again. On the flip side. Mine is still running strong with last factory firmware. But, even then. One must use little tricks to make it work optimal since the bugs never got fixed.

I never would have known about them with out this forum and reading about it. So, thanks for that. They need to get away from that damn Marvell and come back home to Broadcom. It could be legendary once again just like the WRT54GL.

 

[thiggins]

How many radios does this thing have?

AC3200 connonotes tri-radio 3x3 with QAM-256 support on both bands.

AC2600 is QCA based 4x4: 1733 Mbps @ 5 GHz, 800 Mbps @ 2.4 GHz, QAM 256 suppport on both,

 

[RMerlin]

How many radios does this thing have?

AC3200 connonotes tri-radio 3x3 with QAM-256 support on both bands.

AC2600 is QCA based 4x4: 1733 Mbps @ 5 GHz, 800 Mbps @ 2.4 GHz, QAM 256 suppport on both,

Would be surprised to see Marvel jump on the Xstream bandwagon personally.

Someone needs to dig through the FCC, there's a chance that there's more info available there, if the router is already developed enough to end up in DD-WRT's source code.

 

[sfx2000]

How many radios does this thing have?

Hard to tell at the moment, and Marvell always dances around different configs from the norm it seems (like 4*4:3 that they did in Wave 1) - also not very clear about VHT160 - whether it's 80+80 or 160 wide (160 wide is tough from both a technical perspective on the front end, as well as spectrum/channel management as it does overlap into some of the DFS zones).

And it might be a mix of chips - 2.4 could be the older Wave 1 (4*4:3, or even 2*2:2), saving some costs there, and 5GHz could be Wave 2 with the full monty...

I guess we'll find out soon enough...

 

[sfx2000]

Would be surprised to see Marvel jump on the Xstream bandwagon personally.

Someone needs to dig through the FCC, there's a chance that there's more info available there, if the router is already developed enough to end up in DD-WRT's source code.

Wouldn't be the first time that someone has moved from Marvell radios to someone else like Broadcom or QC-Atheros - it has happened before...

Apple did that with the 802.11n Airports (which are basically an older Marvell reference design), moving from the TopDogs over to Broadcom, which was easy enough for them as the WiFi was on a daughterboard (like WRT1900acV1), and Apple controlled the whole SW stack, so integrating drivers was less of a challenge (and BSD has better licensing compared to GPL/LGPL).

There's nothing stopping them from moving to another WiFi vendor, and with Linksys' commitment to 3rd party, moving to a more "open" WiFi chipset could create a lot of goodwill inside the FOSS *WRT community...

 

[thiggins]

No sign of this in FCC database.

Latest is Q87-EA7300 Max-Stream AC1750 MU-MIMO GIGABIT ROUTER

Seems to be nothing coming in the near term.

 

[sfx2000]

No sign of this in FCC database.

Latest is Q87-EA7300 Max-Stream AC1750 MU-MIMO GIGABIT ROUTER

Seems to be nothing coming in the near term.

It likely won't show up until they're ready to submit for FCC Type Certification - might consider crawling the EU testing database... as the WRT3200ACM-UK part number is starting to show up on various sales databases according to the google...

 

[sfx2000]

I saw Brainslayer commit support for this model to DD-WRT in past few days. Since the WRT line is committed to being opensource-friendly, I assume it will be Marvel-based.

Here's the commit that Brainslayer dropped in to DDWRT over on the GitHub mirror, so probably useful to keep an eye on that if interested..

https://github.com/mirror/dd-wrt/commit/579ecb88aaf32d4c62addc25b18b88c66809ad81

Brainslayer's comment over on the DDWRT forum indicates that Wireless drivers are present yet, and he's shared pretty much what everyone knows about this device.

 

[thiggins]

might consider crawling the EU testing database

I'll leave that to others...

 

[RMerlin]

Wouldn't be the first time that someone has moved from Marvell radios to someone else like Broadcom or QC-Atheros - it has happened before...

Won't happen with the WRT line. Remember that Linksys said that they can be opensource-friendly with the WRT line of products because Marvel allows them to store radio information in a separate, locked down section of the firmware. Therefore any BCM-based model would have to fall under the EA product line, unless BCM also implemented a similar architecture.

 

[sfx2000]

How many radios does this thing have?

AC3200 connonotes tri-radio 3x3 with QAM-256 support on both bands.

AC2600 is QCA based 4x4: 1733 Mbps @ 5 GHz, 800 Mbps @ 2.4 GHz, QAM 256 suppport on both,

Linksys can name the device however they want... however I truly doubt it would be a "tri-band" in the Broadcom X-Stream/CleverConnect scheme of things...

802.11n 64QAM 4*4:4 is 600Mbps in short guard interval (802.11n MCS32) - that's assuming that the 2.4GHz side is 4 stream, which is of little benefit, so...

So let's consider lowering costs by using the current 3 stream option that has been used with the WRT1900ac/acs - so keeping in standards - 450Mbps max, going Turbo, that also gives 600 out of IEEE specs... which Linksys has done with the WRT line, using TurboQAM to pump the numbers..

802.11ac 256QAM 4*4:4 is 1733Mbps using MSC9 on 80MHz, on 160MHz - it's 3466Mbs...

Worst case - this is another marketing classification - AC4266 class if using 160Mhz - given that both 2.4 and 5GHz are QAM256 and 4 streams... keeping it in spec - it still gives us up to AC4066 class, again with 11ac taking 160Mhz

Which is totally superior to the psuedo AC5300 class devices currently being sold to consumers - bigger numbers, must be better...

NOTE - See how this whole class rating is very broken, and it has been for some time as the OEM and the chipset vendors just break it... And knocking out the non-standard BS that Broadcom tries to pass off - e.g. MCS10/11 is out of spec, and QAM1024 is also out of spec...​

Marvell does things a bit different that QCA-Atheros or Broadcom - and we haven't seen a Marvell MU solution to date - might be good, might not be good, who knows... it'll be interesting to see...

The real interest is the VHT160 and 4 stream radios... and how this would work with a mix of MU and SU 80MHz clients - think MU is hard - now try to balance MU and SU across two channels...

At the moment - the QCA solution is the class of the field with regards to MU-MIMO in 80MHz, so it'll be interesting to see what Marvell brings to the table - but more importantly, the interoperability challenges here - as Broadcom, at the moment, is still very strong in the candidate platforms that would most benefit from MU - handsets, tablets, and TV boxes...

 

[sfx2000]

More fuel to the fire....

Seems real - multiple web vendors in the EU are showing up in Google searches, and B&H has an entry, but when one goes to access...

From the DDWRT thread - the 88W8964 firmware is supposedly checked in...

Nothing yet on the FCC site - but that site is only updated on a periodic basis - not real-time...

 

[RMerlin]

The marketing stuff router manufacturers are trying to push down our throats these days is starting to read like a mixture of snake oil and late-night infomercial. Nitro-QAM, MAX-STREAM... It's getting a bit silly IMHO. Reminds me of an old friend who was joking about new video cards with more "mega-turbo-giga-pixel-per-second-power". So now Linksys calls MU-MIMO "MAX-STREAM" apparently. Great, even more confusion on the market.

 

[sfx2000]

It's the "Rich Corinthian Leather" marketing stuff

(It's an old Chrysler thing from the mid-70's)

EDIT - I should have said "Soft", as that was the actual quote

 

[RogerSC]

It's the "Rich Corinthian Leather" marketing stuff

(It's an old Chrysler thing from the mid-70's)

That reference cracked me up, never made sense to me at the time. Although there's this:

http://wheels.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/14/getting-it-right-for-ricardo-montalban/

Sorry to get off-topic, I'm done now, that's all *smile*.

I do agree that what they're marketing now and what actually matters to me are like totally different *smile*.

 

[sfx2000]

Unknown what wireless chipsets - features supposedly are VHT160 and MU-MIMO - however, I suspect it will be a Marvell solution -- 88W8964 - info here

Called the WiFi chipset right - confirmed by Brainslayer, who is doing the DDWRT work for the WRT-3200...

the wrt series uses 88w8864, but the new wrt3200 has a 88w8964 which is a vht160 supporting wave 2 chipset. it also has a third sdio chipset for bluetooth and wifi. i can't talk about he purpose right now since i dont know if belkin/linksys is concerned about any details yet.
and yes there will be opensource firmware support straight from product launch. thats the plan. right now the 88w8964 support is not finished by marvell. i have a prerelease driver pqtch which works in 2.4 ghz, but fails in 5 ghz​

 

[sfx2000]

So to answer Tim's question - three radio's based on source code commits and comments from the DDWRT forums...

The 2.4GHz primary, the 5GHz primary, and then this auxiliary SDIO based radio with BT/WiFi combo..

The primaries - AC2600 class based on 4 streams and VHT80 - when taking 5GHz to VHT160, the numbers go up, so Linksys is being conservative a bit...

The other radio...

Based on the SDIO interface, it could be 88W8897 perhaps (2*2:2 VHT80 dualband) on the high end, but this is spendy... so this is a bit wishful thinking...

The 88W8887 is a more likely candidate chipset, which is a low power single stream dual band WiFi/BT SDIO - uses the orion driver, this driver is mentioned in Brainslayer's commit back in early Sept 2016... the 8887 is pretty much self contained, in my past experience with Marvell and integration, there are some chipset they have that are, for lack of a better word, easy to bring into to a platform...

What is the purpose of that aux radio - first guess would be for IOT clients (esp with BTLE in the mix), freeing up the primaries for the traditional fixed/nomadic/mobile applications that we all use...

There's enough spare GPIO's to support another interface on the Armada 385, so keeping eSATA and USB3, along with this aux radio makes sense...

Cool!