[Question/Recommendation] WRT3200ACM

As the hardware is identical, there is no difference for running OpenWrt on one or the other (aside from picking the right firmware image).

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Thx, do you know about problems with the release builds?

Thank you as well. Could you provide some details for "performance and coverafe yould be better"?

Beside this: Why https://openwrt.org/toh/hwdata/linksys/linksys_wrt3200acm is called "v1" but https://openwrt.org/toh/linksys/wrt_ac_series?s[]=wrt3200acm lists only one model?

What problems?
There are no special problems with WRT3200ACM.
There was some difficulty a few months ago when Linksys changed the flash chip in the new WRT3200ACMs to an unknown and unsupported chip but that support was subsequently developed.

(note that all wrt1900ac series routers suffer to to some extent from he sporadic development of the mwlwifi wifi driver)

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To my knowledge it should be fine(?) however pretty much all testing including 3rd party firmwares occurs on the master branch so I can't say for sure.

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Thankk you. I just found https://www.mbreviews.com/linksys-wrt3200acm-dual-band-tri-stream-160-router-review/ where the author mentions:

UPDATE 07.22.2018: The Linksys WRT3200ACM has gone through multiple radical changes during its two years of existence, so, while at the beginning the router would function properly and had a fantastic wireless performance, sometimes last year, lots of users started complaining that the WRT3200ACM was having serious issues with the 5GHz radio (some have hinted that it may be a hardware problem and that the Marvell chip needed to be changed) and that the LED lights would become dim after a few months of normal use. Considering that the review I did a year and a half ago may not portray the current condition of the WRT3200ACM, I re-purchased it and retested the device to see if Linksys has managed to release a stable firmware which would at least solve the 5GHz radio instability.

Is there any way how I can determine to get a recent (2018 produced?) model (like looking for special serial numbers?), is it just luck not to run into problems or does the recent OpenWRT will cover all possible problems of the WRT3200ACM hardware changes?

The only hardware change known was a flash chip brand change in November 2017.
Models before this time had the old one, and after this have the new one. Both are supported in latest Openwrt.

The wireless chip being a hardware problem sounds rubbish to me. Sounds like the driver, which has been plagued with bugs and poor performance with certain clients since inception.

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Thanks for clarification, I'm t'a little bit tired considering which router to buy and will go for the WRT3200ACM now. Thx a lot everybody for answering my questions!

In all fairness i can reproduce the problem with the dim LED's on my unit but it doesn't bother me much as the unit works fine.

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WRT3200acm is running grate for me with latest driver. I have a lot of devices and all is good for me.

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Hi @tapper
which one is the latest driver? 18.06.01? Development version?
@all
I have one WRT3200acm from Jan 17 in storage, which i gave up on using LEDE, because of unstable and unusable WiFi. It was just no fun waiting for channel changes, rebooting it five times a day, when you are using it for work purposes.
When i look at https://github.com/kaloz/mwlwifi/issues it looks like WiFi still has issues esp. with Intel 8260 (2x2). And the one marvel developer has too much workload to fix it soon.

If anyone can confirm 5Ghz not changing channels and has no degrading throughput over time i would really like to give it another try, as the hardware is still great.

You can try on http://cdn.corifeus.com/openwrt, always latest wifi kaloz, never a problem, i am using newer wifi laptop intel 9260

Hi I am running Development version? SNAPSHOT r7894 I think It has same
driver as 18.06.1 as far as I know. Give 18.06.1 a go and then If you
have any issues then flash a snapshot. you can keep your config files
you will just have to install packages. Let us know how you go on.

Did you ever find a fix for this? I'm running into these exact same errors on a used WRT3200ACM I picked up, I've flashed it with openwrt 18.06.1. I've also tried the updated precompiled wifi drivers from this thread to no avail (my post in that thread contains some related error messages to those you've posted).

I'm finding that the router, when first flashed, works fine as a switch and lets me connect and configure it, but then once I enable wifi I get at most a few minutes of use before both radios become non responsive and I see interesting messages in logread and dmesg that are beyond my understanding but include those timeouts and "cmd 0x801d" messages you've quoted.

Snapshots or compiling yourself from master branch works fine

 -----------------------------------------------------
 OpenWrt SNAPSHOT, r8019+20-ef01c1d308
 -----------------------------------------------------
root@LEDE:~# uptime
 05:47:43 up 11 days, 17:10,  load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00

I always use trunk code, the wifi stability is perfect for my use case, only the coverage and maybe speed in contrast to other vendors..

I have a WRT1200AC and 5 GHz Wi-Fi isn't working. As a last measure I tried running it as a WDS repeater. It happily works as a client and bridges packets to its switch, but the (repeater) AP never stays up. It tries to run DFS despite having assigned a channel by the Master WDS AP and ends up disabling its AP, because it can't change the channel (obviously).

Can't you just change to a non-DSF channel on the first router?

WRT1200AC has Non-DFS channels (149+) locked out in the firmware.

Hi,

What is the current status of this router? I'm really considering this because of my internet upgrade (100Mbit to 1Gbit) and it looks promising, however when I checked this thread I can see lots of 5Ghz Wifi issues. Is this fixed already?

I have zero issues with 5Ghz on at least two devices (different clients on both), 2.4Ghz seems to be more troublesome but I don't use it at all so can't say. The SDIO radio seems reliable in that regard but it has limited range. In general, works great and is very stable.

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