Setting Up 802.11ac On A Linksys WRT1900AC Router
Now that I have a faster MacBook Pro, I wanted to leverage the fact that I had a Linksys WRT1900AC router that was capable of doing 802.11ac and my MacBook Pro also does 802.11ac. If they played nice together, I could get a theoretical maximum speed of 1300 Mbps. In reality it would likely see something north of 600 Mbps to something around 1024 Mbps because your environment may limit the actual speed that you get. But upon my initial testing, I discovered that I was only getting 802.11n on the MacBook Pro. I found that to be weird because when I checked the router I had these options selected under the 5GHz band section of my router’s wireless configuration:
Please take note of the Network Mode. To me, that meant that I was set up to let devices that were 802.11a and 802.11n compatible work on the 5GHz band. That explains why I wasn’t getting 802.11ac speeds. As I didn’t have any 802.11ac devices at the time, this was the most logical setting for me to use. So I did.
What made the situation even more confusing was the fact that nowhere in the user interface of the router does it specify an option for 802.11ac:
That was baffling to me seeing as this router is capable of doing 802.11ac according to Linksys. Thus I figured that I was doing something wrong or I was not looking in the right place. I checked their FAQ and found nothing there that could help me. I also did what I tell my customers to do which is to read the manual and found no assistance there. So on a hunch, I flipped this setting to Mixed. After a reboot of the router and a check of my MacBook Pro, I had 802.11ac speeds.
This is an area that Linksys should consider improving because their typical users may not invest the time to experiment with these settings. As a result they could get frustrated and ditch this router for a different brand, or flood their tech support lines with questions that could easily be answered if the router’s user interface were clearer and/or the manual and FAQ provided better guidance on this front. So my advice to Linksys would be to clean up the user interface so that people who don’t bother reading the manual can easily set up their network for 802.11ac, and clean up their documentation because other than mentioning that the WRT1900AC is 802.11ac capable, I couldn’t find any mention on how exactly to do that. Those two things would be a big help to their users. But in the absence of that, I hope this post helps someone who finds themself in the same situation as yours truly until Linksys gets around to doing the things that I mentioned above.
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