I recently bought the Archer C7 for my parents and hardware version 5 was delivered. Given its performance I decided to buy one myself as well, however the shop delivered a version 4.0. I went to the shop to replace it for the V5 model but they now sell TP-Link Archer A7 only.
Question: from a OPENWRT point of view, is the Archer C7 v4 model okay or should I really look for a V5 model?
Seems like the C7 is replaced by the A7, and would you recommend me to return it to the shop and buy a A7? Since last December the A7 seems to support OPENWRT, Support for Archer A7
There is virtually no difference between v4 and v5, aside from the number of USB ports (two for v4, one for v5) - and the same holds true for the corresponding A7 revisions.
That seems a bit counter-intuitive! Reducing USB ports to 1 doesn't sound like improvement! Not sure why they did it.
According to this https://www.windowscentral.com/tp-link-archer-c7-ac1750-wi-fi-router-vs-tp-link-archer-a7, the difference is support for Amazon Alexa (that would matter only if you are using stock firmware I imagine? So it's up to you to decide if you want to have the Alexa option in case you revert to stock in the future, or if you prefer the two USB ports on the C7 (unless the version they have of the A7 have two USB ports also), and then there is the price factor.
It's no longer a top-end model (ar71xx/ ath79 is end of the line, with ipq40xx/ ipq806x/ ipq807x being the high-end successors), so saving pennies probably makes sense to them.
okay thank you for your responses, I keep the Archer C7 (V4), don't care about the USB ports
@mk24: can you please provide the link where you are referring to (rather than using the trunk of the WIKI pages?
@Hegabo: Archer A7 and snapshot, I think I do understand the principle of a snapshot. Would expect that also for the A7 an official release will become avaialble within a few months, or is that not realistic?
I don't know to be honest. I'm relatively new here and can't tell. I would expect that being a popular router it will be taken care of. But tut then again that's only my personal though.
Having said that, if the two routers are identical (apart from the flash layout), then there is probably no need to make a trip to the store to change it, and then wait for the release (though probably snapshot for A7 will be only different than the release of C7 in flash layout, so there is no big probability for bugs anyway).
When there is a new major version it should roll in all the new models that are present in the trunk.
I would think the A7 is similar enough to the C7 that once you have OpenWrt installed (A7 factory trunk) you could then force it to a C7 release build and call it a C7 from then on. But I don't know without actually trying it... It looks like they have the same partition scheme.
I just got a brand new US ver 4.0, looks like old stock and I came to this thread with the same question before I open the box -- keep this one or try to exchange it for a v5. From the data sheets it appears v4 is clocked slightly higher (775 vs 750MHz) though I doubt it makes any difference in use, in particular that I'm going to use it as an AP. Maybe that's why v4 has a 2A wall wart vs 1.5A for v5.
Anything I should be aware of to flash OpenWRT on it? Should I first update it to the latest TP-Link firmware or just try directly with whatever firmware it has out of the box and see how it goes? I don't mind doing the tftp dance but if the web interface works, it's just easier.