Linksys WRT1900AC Dual Band WiFi Router

Linksys has announced the Linksys WRT1900AC, bringing back the iconic WRT with a revamp for the demanding modern user.

The new router shares the same blue-and-black stackable design as the WRT54G, but it's larger and comes with much more powerful components. In fact it's the most powerful model on the market so far, running a 1.2Ghz ARM-based dual-core processor, 128MB of Flash storage, and, 256MB of DDR3 RAM. The device features four antennas (instead of the three you'll find in other high-end routers) and now includes an eSATA port, in addition to one USB 3.0 port and one USB 2.0 port. The idea is now you can host more peripheral devices at a time and have even faster network storage speeds when coupled with an external hard drive.

As a Wi-Fi router, the new router supports the latest standards to offer up to 1,300Mbps on the 5Ghz frequency band and up to 600Mbps on the 2.4Ghz frequency band, which translates into the combined Wi-Fi speed of up to 1,900Mbps. For wired clients, it comes with a standard set of one WAN port and four LAN ports, with all of which supporting gigabit Ethernet.

There will be immediate comparisons to Asus’s unannounced (officially, at least) RT-AC87U, the existence of which was revealed in a press release from 802.11ac chipset manufacturer Quantenna. One of the key differences is that the Quantenna chipset delivers four spatial streams and can provide a physical link rate of 1.7 Gbps. To take advantage of that speed, of course, you’ll need a client adapter that can also support four spatial streams, and I haven’t heard of any such animal.

Either way, the Marvell chipset Linksys chose for the WRT1900AC is limited to three spatial streams and a physical link rate of 1.3Gbps on the 5GHz frequency band using the 802.11ac protocol. The router will support throughput of 600 mbps on the 2.4GHz frequency band using the 802.11n protocol.

The Linksys WRT1900AC is designed to be the best of the best when it comes to Wi-Fi routers and it is due to land in store from spring 2014 for around €279.