 HotSpot Shield service makes your internet browsing safer, more secure, and fully private. Click now to learn more. The Linksys WRT50 4G router, which Linksys claims, and I believe them, is the top selling router of all time, earned its legendary status by being a solid piece of hardware with great support from the open source community, who built firmwares for it that performed better, were more stable, and added features that, especially at the time, were only available on expensive commercial grade routers. Now we have finally got its spiritual successor, the WRT1900AC, in our hands. But making a video about it right now puts me in a bit of an awkward position. Two months ago, I could have gotten on the hype train and said, OMG, Linksys is going back to their roots, it's super powerful hardware, they're gonna collaborate with the open source community, it's gonna be awesome! And by two months from now, Linksys might have completely smoothed out their relationship with the makers of popular third party firmwares like OpenWRT and DDWRT, and that message might be completely valid again. But right now is an in-between stage where the hardware is available, but none of the big aftermarket firmware guys have announced any kind of timeline for support for this router, with most of the communication from these communities being fairly critical of Linksys' collaborative efforts so far, and their use of a Marvell wireless chipset rather than a more widely supported Broadcom chipset. But there's good news, if you ask Linksys, there's a ton of work being done behind the scenes to get support rolled out in a timely manner, so stay tuned. For the time being though, all I can say is what you're getting now when you buy what is one of the most expensive consumer routers on the market. Physically, the unit is a real throwback to the old WRT series, with a black and blue look and stackable design that will look very familiar to fans of the old WRT54G. On the bottom we find tons of ventilation holes and rubber feet that include wall mounting support, a nice touch. The front is mostly taken up by the usual indicator LEDs for connectivity and activity. On the sides we find two of the four included antennas, which are not internal or permanently attached, a baffling trend that plagued us for a couple of years and now thankfully seems to be going away, so you can easily upgrade these if you want. Moving around to the back we've got 5 gigabit ethernet ports, one of which is designated for WAN, a WPS button, a power switch, a power in jack, a thankfully easy to reach hardware reset button, huge thumbs up there, and a couple of storage ports that appear to be labeled similarly to internal SATA connectors as ports 0 to 3, except that there are only two of them. Another investigation reveals that the right one is a USB 2.0 slash eSATA combo port labeled USB1, and the left one is a USB 3 superspeed port labeled USB2. Funnily enough, for all the marketing around wireless speeds and all the cryptic labeling of these ports, these are actually one of the biggest differentiating points for this router, and they're capable of throughput in the 60 to 70 megabyte per second range on eSATA and USB3, numbers that put this router cleanly in the mix with dedicated NAS hardware in terms of drive performance. Finally on the back, two more removable antennas bring our total to four, although it should be noted that the router supports three spatial streams, so only the most optimal of these three will function at any given time. Finally on the top we find shiny, prominent Linksys branding, I guess they're happy to be out from under the Cisco umbrella, and more ventilation holes over a temperature controlled cooling fan that didn't even turn on throughout my testing, but will ramp up under extremely heavy load and the largest heat sink I have ever seen on a router. I mean seriously, that is one big old hunk of metal down there. Feature wise, things are a little bit light for a premium router with no VPN support and fairly limited options in terms of parental and advanced wireless controls, but Linksys does support both a wireless repeater mode and bridge mode, although I wasn't able to test these since I've only got one of these at the moment. The software setup process is pretty straightforward overall, Linksys includes a password on the wifi out of the box, thank you by the way, and both their easy setup wizard and advanced UI will be very familiar if you've used any of Linksys' last couple of generations smart routers. It's pretty snappy, but a feature that I was sad to see missing from my older EA4200 non cloud connect router is the ability to apply almost all changes without restarting the hardware, that was freaking awesome for a trial and error network configuration guy like me, but I suspect for most people it's not really that big of an issue. Now onto performance, while unfortunately I can't replicate the assortment of routers used for comparative analysis and the well established test procedures that Tim Higgins at smallnetbuilder.com used for his review of this router, which you should definitely check out by the way, it's linked in the video description, what I can do is run it through the paces by testing both 2.4GHz and 5GHz speeds on my Dell XPS12 with an upgraded Intel 3160 AC wireless network card to give you guys an idea of how satisfying the experience is overall. The router was installed on one side of the main floor of a three story house and my four test locations were right next to it with no obstructions about 10 feet away, directly upstairs through the floor, upstairs on the other side of the house in the WAN showroom and finally through two exterior walls in the garage where it's really nice to have decent WiFi connectivity for like if you're working on a project or something, you want to have a movie to watch or whatever the case may be. For the measurements I used iPerf with the following arguments which gave me consistent results but I would definitely be open to suggestions about how to improve our results in the future. I'd also love to hear from you guys if you'd like us to do more wireless networking videos, we really haven't done almost anything ever and if we did then we might have actually something to compare against in the future so post your thoughts in the forum fed linked in the video description if you'd like to see more of this category from us or if you just can't be bothered. So conclusion time, the WRT50 4G was revolutionary because it delivered stable and for the time very powerful hardware with a user flashable firmware. It captured the hearts of the modding and enthusiast communities with a variety of third party firmwares available for it that enabled features that at the time could not be found in routers at that price point and that's the big gap I see in the new strategy. The 54G was very competitively priced, I mean I mentioned the price twice just now, which drove widespread adoption which if there's anything I've learned about the open source community it's that they want their work to be enjoyed by as many people as possible, which drove that open source development that created a pretty amazing positive feedback loop as that open source development drove more sales of the router and I think that's something that without that inexpensive factor is going to be challenging for something so expensive to achieve, especially with competitors like the ASUS RT-AC68U and Netgear R7000, available for so much less with similar performance, albeit without the impressively beefy build quality. So that's where we sit right now. Is the WRT-1900AC a capable platform that given adequate support could compete for your hard earned money? The answer is yes. But whatever Linksys might wish, it is going to have to re-earn that legendary status because their competitors have had over a decade to catch up to the concept of great hardware with support for open firmwares and there are plenty of other great options for modders, many of which are ready to go now and not waiting on future firmware changes. So I want to hear from you guys in the comments. Is it too little too late for the WRT-1900AC or do you think this is just the tip of the iceberg and Linksys is going to build on what a little bird might have told me already is a very successful product? Hmm. Anyway guys, thank you very much for watching. My team and I worked hard on this video. We hope you enjoyed it. If you did, please like and share it. If you didn't, please dislike it and leave a comment with your thoughts. We do take constructive criticism very seriously. 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