Everyone remembers their firstlove wireless router. The way you fumbled with those ports. The way you left the admin password at its default setting. The way you tried, in vain, to get port forwarding to work. The weirdest thing when it comes to My First Router, though, is that nearly all of us had the same one: The blue-and-black Linksys WRT54G. Believe it or not, despite being released 11 years ago, the WRT54G is still a surprisingly popular wireless router, and has now sold more than 50 million units worldwide. In recent years, though, with the popularization of 802.11n and 802.11ac, the humble WRT54G has begun to fade into obsolescence. Not one to simply roll over and lose its title as the maker of the world’s most popular router, and in an attempt to perpetuate the iconic black-and-blue brand, Linksys has now announced the WRT54G’s spiritual successor: The WRT 1900AC.
According to Linksys, the WRT 1900AC has been “11 years in the making,” but we suspect that’s just marketing hyperbole. Outwardly, it appears that the WRT 1900AC is a pretty normal 802.11ac/n router. The “1900” moniker derives from the fact that it supports up to 4×4 802.11n (600Mbps), and 3×3 802.11ac (1300Mbps). Dual-band (2.4GHz and 5GHz) operation is supported. It has four Gigabit Ethernet ports, and an eSATA port and USB 3.0 port for attaching external storage to your network. The rest of the feature set is pretty normal, to be honest — except for one thing: Linksys says the WRT 1900AC is “open source ready.”
The idea is that the 1900AC was developed, from the get-go to support OpenWRT — a Linux-based distribution for embedded devices, such as wireless routers. OpenWRT, as the name implies, was originally developed for the WRT54G, to add much more functionality. DD-WRT, another open-source Linux distro, was also developed for the same purpose. The thing is, though, because most wireless routers are based on just a handful of chipsets, OpenWRT and DD-WRT can be installed on most consumer routers — not just the WRT54G or WRT 1900AC. This is what makes Linksys’ claim that the 1900AC is “open source ready” a tricky pill to swallow — especially when you factor in that this new router costs $300.