Linksys WRT1900ACS

THE BEST WAY TO GET OPEN-SOURCE FIRMWARE RUNNING.

THE WRT SERIES from Linksys is essentially a reboot of the company’s greatest hit. Modelled on the famous WRT54G, the WRT1900ACS even recalls that product’s design. Most importantly, it’s built to be tinkered with, and works well with open-source firmware like DD-WRT and OpenWRT (which were built on the original WRT54G’s firmware).

The hardware itself is no great shakes. It’s a fairly standard AC1900 wireless router with four LAN ports and two USB ports (although one of those USB ports doubles as an eSATA port). It does have more juice internally than most routers, however, with a 1.6GHz dual-core processor and 512MB of memory. Most routers in this price range have 1 or 1.4GHz processors and half as much memory. That extra juice allows it to run heavy versions of open-source router firmware.

The WRT1900ACS comes with Linksys’ standard firmware. It’s perfectly solid, with easy setup, quality mobile apps and a lot of hidden depth. We expect that most people buying this router will be looking to run third-party firmware, however. Linksys has actually worked with OpenWRT ( wiki.openwrt.org) to make switching over to the open source firmware much easier, and even links to versions of OpenWRT from its own webpage. Installing OpenWRT is as simple as it gets — you can just use the standard firmware update tool in the web console; no special codes, resets, hard reboots or other fanciness required.

And that’s what makes this so much more than a standard router. OpenWRT is possessed of capabilities far exceeding that of standard consumer firmware, starting with VPN support, corporate-level security, fine QoS settings, USB modem support, advanced user and traffic controls and much more.