[Cerowrt-devel] archer c7v2 gets third party unupgradable firmware

[Dave Täht]

A pithy note on
https://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/tp-link/archer-c5-c7-wdr7500 - it contains
a bitter "thank you" to the FCC - you can't upgrade the firmware to a
third party anymore.

I can confirm this - the archer c7v2 I got off of amazon last week has
firmware 3.14.3, and will not take a web upload of openwrt no matter
what I tried. I also failed to get a tftp upload to work (but did not
try hard enough).

So this rules out the netgear wndr 4300, and tp-link archer c7v2 for
future development efforts by the bufferbloat effort.

It's too bad - the cake qdisc is back at a "nearly ready" state and
could use some performance testing and optimization on these lower end
platforms, and I'd like to get make-wifi-fast off the ground.

I guess it would be good to collect a list of those companies that are
engaging in whole router firmware lockdown instead of just lockdown on
the radio, so we can avoid them in the future.