The Linksys WRT1900AC Dual Band Wi-Fi Router was announced back at CES 2014. It has now made its way to Canada and is now available from a number of Canadian retailers.
The Linksys WRT1900AC Dual-Band Router not only looks a lot like the venerable Linksys WRT54G, one of the best-selling routers of all time, but it also promised to run OpenWrt custom firmware. Belkin, the company that now owns Linksys, promised to work closely with the OpenWrt community to offer such custom firmware but it appears to have started more slowly than expected. As it stands today, no custom firmware is yet ready for download and progress may continue to be slow for some time. In a statement, Belkin explained that some patches required will require the cooperation of Marvell which is behind the Wi-Fi driver:
Linksys has built the WRT1900AC with every intention of providing open source capabilities and making it the best solution available to the community. Linksys has provided OpenWrt with an initial code release that enables open source firmware development. OpenWrt has requested some patches to provide more open source functionality at the Wi-Fi driver level that requires cooperation from Marvell. Marvell is working on the usable driver and getting the required approvals through GPL. We are expecting this to be finalized and ready in the coming weeks.
In the meantime, if you want to pick up the Linksys WRT1900AC Dual Band Wi-Fi Router, you can do so from the following retailers among others for CA$279.99:
Will you be picking up the Linksys WRT1900AC now that it’s available or will you wait until OpenWrt firmware is available? Let us know below.
Source : OpenWrt