I’ll flesh this out with more detail later, but the short version is that I bought a refurbed Linksys EA6900 for $89 at Microcenter – not bad for an AC1900 router, since the Tenda version is $99, and the name brand units tend to be $150-$300. Of course, Linksys still hasn’t learned to make firmware that doesn’t suck, and amongst the reasons this router was so cheap was the fact that it’s got a bootloader issue that caused issues for a lot of people – indeed, I was getting about 600KBytes/sec of throughput with it, which was a huge downgrade from my Asus RT-N56U. Turns out, some enterprising modders managed to patch the bootloader, and in a bizarre moment of win, managed to put the “Merlin” firmware on it, making it work very similar to the Asus unit I’d discarded. Well, that worked just fine for the 2.4GHz band, but not the 5GHz band, which would throw up no matter how I set it on my laptop. So, another firmware flash and minor reconfig later, and I have Tomato running on this router, which is faster than anything I’ve run before, has loads of wonderful features, and gives me the dual band functionality I need. I was hoping to get the WRT1900 in the box, but this unit with Tomato is most definitely a great piece of SOHO networking hardware.
Links and stuff to follow…