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Linksys WRT1900AC AC1900 Dual Band Wireless Router Review

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well that review just made me so unsure what to do. Wasent a fan of the asus and my netgear has been solid for the most part but the lan to wan issues are annoying. But for a router that seems outperformed in every class the extra 50bux seems a waste. Decisions, Decisions.
 
Seems like a all around solid router. BUT. Its $50 over priced. I believe its actually $279.99 but its a limited promo right now. Can't believe they sent you 2! :mad: 1 is enough. And I still can't believe it. The feature set is so far behind other routers configuration wise. Still no FLIPPIN BANDWIDTH METER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! That alone is inexcusable. The firmware better be good and stable. I don't see how they could screw it up considering how fisher price simplistic it is to use.
 
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They sent me two so that I could test bridge mode and check out 600 Mbps link rate in 2.4 GHz.
 
I am still up in the air with it. Like I said. My Linksys E4200 v1 with Tomato firmware is 3+ years old. Its a good time to replace them every 3 years yes? Its still working perfectly fine. But, I don't want to be DOA any time soon either.
 
If you have a router you like and it is doing the job for you, leave it be. New routers, especially AC, tend to be science experiments these days. Let someone else debug them.
 
Interesting start.

If future firmwares are less buggy then the current competitors, then this router should be a better choice. Plus we are now dealing with Marvell chipset, so there is room for improvement down the road. Wheres Broadcom has peaked out in benchmarks.


Would like to see storage performance with SSD drive instead of mechanical drive.
 
If you have a router you like and it is doing the job for you, leave it be. New routers, especially AC, tend to be science experiments these days. Let someone else debug them.
Science experiments ... or how marketing deals with product saturation; invent and hype a new standard. Need that revenue stream to grow-grow-grow!
 
Interesting start.

If future firmwares are less buggy then the current competitors, then this router should be a better choice. Plus we are now dealing with Marvell chipset, so there is room for improvement down the road. Wheres Broadcom has peaked out in benchmarks.


Would like to see storage performance with SSD drive instead of mechanical drive.

Agreed... let's remember the state of the AC68 & R7000's firmwares when they were released... heck let's remember the state of Asus's current f/w! If the wrt1900 has a stable, non-rebooting & 'every feature working' f/w at release then they're 'ahead' of the pack as far as I'm concerned (with the exception of an R7000 running dd-wrt). FYI the openWRT side of this router is apparently DOA & likley will never happen: https://lists.openwrt.org/pipermail/openwrt-devel/2014-April/024589.html, e.g. don't hold your breath for *any* third-party firmwares.

As a side-note, it's slightly frustrating that pre-ordering this unit resulted in a 3 day delay of receiving it (I could've just hopped over to BestBuy and grabbed one?? ).
 
Regarding the WAN-LAN throughput. I'd like to see a benchmark once QOS is turned on as far as I know HW acceleration does not work once QOS is in use.

There must be a reason why the throughput is much worse on the Linksys, maybe it is because they are not using some sort of HW NAT acceleration.

It would be cool if you could try that and see if this makes a difference.
 
Regarding the WAN-LAN throughput. I'd like to see a benchmark once QOS is turned on as far as I know HW acceleration does not work once QOS is in use.

There must be a reason why the throughput is much worse on the Linksys, maybe it is because they are not using some sort of HW NAT acceleration.

It would be cool if you could try that and see if this makes a difference.
I'll give it a quick try. Router was tested with defaults, which is with no QoS engaged.
 
Agreed... let's remember the state of the AC68 & R7000's firmwares when they were released... heck let's remember the state of Asus's current f/w! If the wrt1900 has a stable, non-rebooting & 'every feature working' f/w at release then they're 'ahead' of the pack as far as I'm concerned (with the exception of an R7000 running dd-wrt). FYI the openWRT side of this router is apparently DOA & likley will never happen: https://lists.openwrt.org/pipermail/openwrt-devel/2014-April/024589.html, e.g. don't hold your breath for *any* third-party firmwares.

As a side-note, it's slightly frustrating that pre-ordering this unit resulted in a 3 day delay of receiving it (I could've just hopped over to BestBuy and grabbed one?? ).


Thats not what the email states. What is says, is that Belkin is now accepting patches from openWRT community.

Belkin Inc. would like to announce the patch submission release for WRT1900AC which is based on OpenWRT trunk, the detail base revision is specified in each release.

Its what Merlin is doing for Asus.
 
Tim Higgins, thank you for this review!

I have to be honest; I wasn't expecting great things from this product (re; wireless performance), after all; AC1900 is old news now.

The storage performance is interesting with USB 3.0 and I'm assuming even more so with eSATA, but not at a business level (unless an appropriately large, fast and robust SSD is used for a handful of concurrent users).


The firmware is the biggest letdown though. Lackluster features and configuration options make this product unappealing even with a $100 discount from current prices ($250). When you couple this with subpar performance even compared to the over two year old RT-N66U (I'm judging minimum performance specs, not average or maximums).

What I'm mostly disappointed with is a wasted additional antenna; w/regards to MU-MIMO. Getting better signal is great (if it actually works; it doesn't seem like it does) but getting up to 4x the (download) throughput with multiple users is even better.

No doubt this can be a great product for some users assuming it is stable. The price doesn't put me off either if real technology advances were offered. But as it stands, this is a pass.

With AC2300 within sight (June 2014?) and AC10G (2015) being developed as we speak, going back to the future with this WRT incarnation is the wrong direction in my opinion.
 
If you click on the 'next message' link you'll start to see openWRT devs response to Belkin's attempt to submit patches to the code base... which are basically "You can't do that" and "GTFO"... This thread will help you read between the lines:
http://www.dd-wrt.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=256298&start=45

Yea...just click the "Next message" line of this a few times and read the comments back and forth on each page...very interesting indeed.
Seems they didn't even bother to look into OpenWRT's policy's or know anything about them before dumping something on them. HA! Not well received at all.

https://lists.openwrt.org/pipermail/openwrt-devel/2014-April/024591.html
 
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If you click on the 'next message' link you'll start to see openWRT devs response to Belkin's attempt to submit patches to the code base... which are basically "You can't do that" and "GTFO"... This thread will help you read between the lines:
http://www.dd-wrt.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=256298&start=45





Belkin is getting their shirt together on their end before they give out anything to community, "drivers".
The person that did the submission, did not follow the proper guidelines to submit patches.
 
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What "issues" specifically?

I have a wireless machine that serves up some video to the network and my machine connected to the r7000 via lan will buffer the content at times. Some days its fine. Others it will just start buffering and resetting the r7000 doesn’t help. My old Linksys wrt610N did not have this issue. I also have a Belkin ac1000 acting as a AP as well. I don’t think that’s the issue because I rebooted that as well.

The netgear forums seem to have other people complaining about the same issue as mine. Except they just say wireless to wired problems. Usually with printers.

Also my iphone was having problems on the 2.4ghz i couldnt connect to my XBMC remote or i just had to fudge with it for awhile. I switched to the 5ghz and it seems ok now.

EDIT: Sorry was pre-occupied typing this. The problem is hard to replicate. it either starts having the issue for awhile or it doesnt. No idea what is going on. I exchanged one r7000 for another.. same issue. I just cant tell if its a router defect in the hardware on the r7000 or a software bug causing it. I really am torn between the linksys and this. I know belkin bought linksys but I just always personally trusted the linksys brand. My WRT610N to me worked awesome.
 
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