The IT Nerd

For the last few months, I’ve been trying to find a good home for a couple of pieces of networking gear. The first being the Linksys EA6900 AC1900 802.11ac router and the second being the  Linksys AC1200 wireless USB adapter. Just this past week, I finally found a home for them and I was able to write about them.

First the router. The EA6900 AC1900 is a dual-band router with a 3×3 transmit/receive antenna configuration on each band. The 2.4GHz band supports up to a theoretical 600Mbps and the 5GHz band supports up to 1300Mbps. You also get a USB 2.0 and a 3.0 port for connecting to printers and USB storage devices, and four Gigabit Ethernet ports. It also looks cool. So on the surface, it is hitting all the right notes. Setting up the router was extremely trivial:

1. Power on the router
2. Connect the cable from your modem to the WAN port
3. Wait for the router’s LED to turn a solid green
4. Connect to the pre-configured SSID (the SSID name and password are printed in the setup guide) or connect an Ethernet cable from a laptop to one of the router’s LAN ports;
5. Open a web browser to complete final settings. You have to type in linksyssmartwifi.com as the URL. When I did this, I was directed to the Linksys Smart Wi-Fi Setup Page. From this site, a wizard walks you through configuration and you have the option to skip setup and configure manually.
6. Declare victory and have a beer.

This makes the setup of this router achievable by anyone. Now if you want to set things up manually, you’ll need the router default password which is not printed in the documentation that comes with the router. A quick Google search confirmed that the default password and user name is admin. Now at this point you’re live on the Internet. But if you want to do more, this router will give you a few extra features that you might want to leverage:

• You can manage the router locally or remotely through the Linksys Smart Wi-Fi cloud service. It is easy to use via your smartphone and changes take effect instantly.
• You can optimize the router for whatever you do. For example, I was able to tweak the settings to provide better performance for Netflix on the customer’s Apple TV simply by moving it into a “high priority” group. It made a huge difference as it shaved 50% of the time needed to start a movie or TV show.
• It has full parental controls that enable you to restrict Internet access based on time or by website.
• Connect a hard drive to it to use it as network storage. You can make it a media server or a storage device with folders and some degree of security. And it supports FTP and SAMBA as well as DLNA and UPnP. You can access a storage device attached to the router from the Internet using Linksys Smart Wi-Fi and a third-party DDNS service.

Now in this home there was an Apple TV, a Laptop with 802.11n wireless capability, a desktop PC that was plugged into the router directly via Gigabit Ethernet and a brand new desktop PC with no wireless access. On the latter, I used the Linksys AC1200 Wireless USB adapter. Installing this on a Windows 7 PC was trivial. The device ships with a setup CD. You install the drivers first through a series of clicks presented by a setup wizard. You then connect the adapter to a USB ports and setup is complete.

In terms of performance, this setup is quick. From the desktop with the AC1200 USB adapter which was on the main floor of the customer’s home to the router which is on the second floor of the house, I got just under 350 Mbps which is insanely fast. Though I had to put the desktop into a position where the connection was stable as I was apparently at the limits of the router’s range.

The only problem that I ran into was connecting a printer to it. Using these instructions and installing the proprietary Linksys software that is required, I was able to get remote printing to work on their Windows computers. However, this customer had a Mac Mini on OS X Mavericks and even though I followed these instructions and installed the proprietary Linksys software I could not get printing to work. Even if I got it to work with the Mac Mini, this router doesn’t use standard network printing protocols like IPP, LPD or HP JetDirect. Thus it would make it difficult for me to recommend for use with a printer. I’d recommend using a print server that supports one of the protocols that I mentioned or use a network printer that has direct driver support for the OS that you are using. Another observation that I do have is that this router gets warm bordering on hot in a hurry. Especially under sustained usage with the 5Ghz band. Make sure you place it in an area where there is adequate ventilation.

Here’s my bottom line. If you need a 802.11ac router that gives you a variety of functions at your disposal, look no further than the Linksys EA6900 AC1900 router. It is fast, easy to set up for the most part and easy to tweak for your needs. If you then want to fully leverage 802.11ac on your existing computers, choose the Linksys AC1200 USB adapter which is equally as easy to set up and is fast too. The net result is that you’ll have a home network that will be the envy of your neighbours.

This entry was posted on October 9, 2014 at 7:00 am and is filed under Products with tags Linksys. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.