TP-LINK ARCHER C7 AC1750: Archer C7 router crash Solution

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UPGRADING TP-LINK ARCHER C7 AC1750 TO USE WITH OPENWRT

Why OpenWRT?

One of my home access points is TP-Link Archer C7. I purchased it to get all benefits of the 5Ghz 802.11ac standard for the laptop and 2.4Ghz band for the older devices. However, it was never working for me well:

In 5Ghz band Apple devices were working very unstable
Sometime i had to reboot router because of wifi stability issues. After reboot it was working until next issue. There are no debug options/logs in the native firmware.
Device was spamming network with STP packets and some other data, no way to disable.
After upgrading to the new firmware versions i had to reconfigure it completely. And in fact difference between regullary updated versions was minimal
Native firmware configurable only via web interface, probably backdoors are included

So i decided to reflash it to the OpenWRT and found, that i am “happy” owner of the TP-Link Archer C7v1, with AR1A (v1) variant of QCA9880 chip, not supported in the open source ath10k driver. So there is no way to use 5Ghz with OpenWRT at all. Only good thing that 5Ghz chip is not soldered on the board, but connected to the PCIe mini card socket. So i decided to replace it.

Amazon Best Selling Router AC1750 Router Review

TP-Link Archer C7 AC1750 Wireless Dual Band Gigabit Router

Hardware specifications
TP-LINK Archer C7 has a Qualcomm Atheros QCA9558 processor, running at 720 MHz, with 128 MB of RAM memory and 16 MB of storage space. It offers support for all the modern networking standards, including 802.11ac, which means that this router offers two wireless networks: one for the 2.4 GHz frequency and one for the 5 GHz frequency. The maximum theoretical bandwidth is of 450Mbps on the 2.4 GHz frequency and 1300Mbps on the 5 GHz frequency, leading to a total of 1.75Gbps. One aspect that is not exactly obvious is that this wireless router has a total of 6 antennas. There are three external antennas for the 5 GHz wireless frequency and 3 internal antennas for the 2.4 GHz frequency. You can see their positioning in the diagram below.

TP-LINK ARCHER C7 AC1750

Pages

Amazon Best Selling Router AC1750 Router Review

TP-Link Archer C7 AC1750 Wireless Dual Band Gigabit Router

TP Link wireless AC router configuration and manual setup, Archer Dual Band 2.4 and 5 Ghz

Archer C7 router crash Solution

TP Link Archer C7 Initial Setup and Config