Overview - Part 1 of 2
I spent a couple of hours poking at a WRT1900AC (I got mine last Wednesday).
Since Tim already pretty much covered everything related to wifi performance (and because my small apartment doesn't really pose any challenge to any wifi router), I will focus on other aspects of the router in this overview.
Initial impression - the package
The whole packaging has a very premium feel to it, just like those enthusiast products you can buy from companies such as Corsair (a power supply I recently installed in a customer's system came in a velvelt pouch!), or Asus's ROG/TUF series of motherboards. The (rather large) box is very well padded, with cutouts for the antennas
The router itself also feels very solid. It's quite large and a bit heavy, but it doesn't feel cheap in any way. The Ethernet jacks themselves also had a very loud "click!" when I plugged my cables into it.
Belkin went to a power pack design (think like a laptop power pack) rather than a wall wart, which those of us using powerbars or a small UPS to plug their networking equipment will definitely prefer.
Initial setup
After telling it I had no interest in creating an online account and preferred the non-cloud based configuration, I went through the initial setup wizard. The procedure is fairly simple and the UI looks quite clean. After going through a few screens I was connected to the Internet, and ended up on the firmware's main page. That's where things started to go downhill for me...
Wifi performance:
As noted earlier, I have a small appartment with quite thin walls, so it won't provide any kind of challenge to any modern router. I was sitting in the same room as the router while testing it. Quick summary: the link rate was slightly higher than my RT-AC68U (I was switching between 780 and 866 Mbps, while the RT-AC68U never gives me above 780 Mbps), however a quick throughout test showed slighly lower throughput than the Asus. This is the kind of thing which I suspect will improve over time as Belkin tweaks things out in the driver (considering this is a new hardware platform for them versus the traditionnal Broadcom they are used to work with).
Guest networking:
After completing the initial setup, I was puzzled when I noticed that Windows was reporting two unencrypted Guest networks available by default! After digging through the documentation, I figured out that Belkin is implementing their Guest network as some form of captive portal. Anyone can connect to the wifi radio, however web access gets redirected to a login page, where you must enter a password provided by the router's administrator. Personally I'm unsure whether this is a good or a bad idea. It's good because it might make it easier to connect a guest without having them configure an actual wifi profile. However this probably also means that anything they send over the Guest Network would be unencrypted.
At the very least, I would have made Guest Networking to be disabled by default.
Firmware interface - overview
Overall, the web interface looks clean, polished and modern. It's generally rather responsive, with the usual 2-5 seconds pause between saves as services get restarted. The pages where you can edit entries (such as the DHCP reservation list) is clean and intuitive to use.
Speaking of DHCP reservations... I'd love to understand why adding a new DHCP reservations causes wireless devices to be disconnected from Wifi? Since I can't see any technical reason why the two of them would be linked, I'd have to assume it's a bug, or a design oversight. Makes it quite difficult to configure a couple of DHCP reservations from a wireless laptop as you get disconnected from the router between every saves...
Another weird thing with the web interface: for some odd reason, you cannot select/copy any text on the webui. So forget about copy/pasting your DHCP leases, or just copying a MAC address on a page to paste it elsewhere - for some reason Chrome refused to let me select and copy any text.
Some of the more advanced features rely on drag'n'drop to be configured (such as QoS). This has both advantages (very visual to configure) and inconveniences (makes things more limited - the QoS feature for instance is limited to drag and dropping devices and/or protocol definitions in a list)
Some features can also be hard to find. I thought there was no way to reboot the router through the web interface, until I accidentally found it on the Troubleshooting page.
Firmware features:
As noted by others, the firmware is very lacking in features. A 279$ router that targets enthusiasts should support at least a number of enthusiast-favorite features. For instance, there is no telnet/SSH interface. (even more annoying: even the serial console offers no console terminal). So basically, everything related to the stock firmware is completely closed off, with zero possibility to tweak, or even diagnose things out.
There is also no VPN service, which is something an increasing number of enthusiast users are interested in.
The QoS is also very, very basic. They also made it so novice-friendly that it's hard to know what it actually does in reality. The more technically-skilled users will want to know how that priority system works. What percentage of traffic gets allocated to who?
The number of supported DDNS services is limited (altho they did add No-IP support in a recent firmware update). Supporting a meta-service such as DNS-o-Matic would have allowed people to use a very wide range of available services without putting the burden of supporting these on Belkin's shoulders.
Maybe my memory's wrong, but I thought I saw mentions about the router lacking a way to monitor traffic. You do get traffic monitoring out of the Networkmap section. Nothing very exhaustive, but should be enough for most home users who simply need to track down monthly usage due to their ISP's limited allocated traffic.
Also, no ext3 support according to the documentation felt kinda odd to me. I know they got pretty good NTFS performance, but the reliability of ext3/ext4 might be desirable.
One thing that puzzles me. Old timers like me know what "Identd port 113" is for. Anyone who has first set foot on the Internet in the Facebook (or even Myspace) era will have no idea what this setting is for. Why are Linksys firmwares still offering a setting to filter this out?
