TL-WDR4900 Ultimate N900 Wireless Dual Band Gigabit Router with Twin USB Ports - Wireless Router - 4-Port-Switch

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Price: $136.83    

Product Description

TP-LINK 450/450MBit WLAN-Router Dualband GBit-LAN

TL-WDR4900 Ultimate N900 Wireless Dual Band Gigabit Router with Twin USB Ports - Wireless Router - 4-Port-Switch Review

There are at least two versions of the TL-WDR4900 available, the one delivered by ALB-System was the European version (v1.3) with the Freescale P1014 processor (800 MHz), two independent radio units, 16 MB of flash, and 128 MB of RAM reported at boot. Delivery was surprisingly quick, even though it had to make a long trip here. Working with ALB-System was also very smooth.

The router comes up nicely with stock firmware and performs well in that configuration. The only issue I ran into was that the administrator password I set might have been too long, and that required a hard reset. Stock firmware looks typical in its feature set for this class of router. Nicely detailed manuals are available on the TP-Link website if you want to go through it yourself.

Range is superior to the Netgear WNDR3700.

Power consumption appears to be very reasonable, 10 W or less.

The antennas are detachable and, from what I have seen of others' photos of the interior, support 5 GHz only, with internal antennas used for 2.4 GHz.

US-based purchasers should be aware that the unit I purchased included an European power adapter; 100-240 V input; 12 V, 2500 mA output. I am currently running the unit off a 12 V, 2A adapter I had available without any apparent ill effect, though I do not have any USB devices attached at this time. One could also use a European, two-pin to US, two-blade plug adapter, but that seems like a pretty unwieldy combination. For an illustration of what you would need you can look at BoxWave European to American Outlet Plug Adapter (I have not purchased this item and can't comment on it.)

I had discussions with TP-Link US last month (March, 2013) and they have not yet released a version targeted for the US market, though they were planning on doing so in the coming months. They did not have any information on what the hardware configuration might be for that device. The Freescale processor seems to me to be superior to the Qualcomm/Atheros SoC that is often used in these devices. The Chinese-market unit I have read has six external antennas and uses a Qualcomm/Atheros SoC running at 720 MHz.

I run OpenWRT as I need the device to perform some advanced networking functions and provide services that are generally beyond the needs of a typical home or small-business user.

OpenWRT has been supporting this on the development branch ("Barrier Breaker") and builds can be easily flashed to the unit through the vendor-supplied GUI.

Running OpenWRT (r36211 at the moment) has been very smooth, with excellent performance on both bands and a variety of clients, from older 802.11g units, through current 802.11n devices. With OpenWRT, multiple virtual access points for each of the radios are easily configured, as is 802.1q VLAN support. There is more than sufficient flash available to run full-on BIND in addition to the "normal" OS functions. OpenWRT at this time (April, 2013) does not support the hardware NAT, but I have not run into any performance issues.

The applicable thread on the OpenWRT forum (as of April, 2013) is OpenWrt → General Discussion → Developing Support for TPLINK WDR4900

I will likely purchase another of these units.

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