In one of my recent teardowns, commenting on the variety of piece parts included with the manufacturer’s various products in its streaming media box line, I noted:

I would not want to be the person in charge of managing onn. product contents inventory…

Seeming diversity, but under-the-hood commonality

Multiply that sentiment by 100x or so and you’ve got a sense of my feelings about the poor folks who manage the inventories of (and forecast the future sales of) router manufacturers’ product lines. Today’s teardown victim is from Linksys, but the situation’s very much the same at ASUS, (Amazon) eero, Netgear, TP-Link or any of the other hardware providers.

There are now only a few foundation silicon suppliers, and (unlike the relatively recent past), the pace of technology evolution has notably slowed of late, particularly in the wireless realm. The most significant innovation of the past decade has been mesh networking, which only indirectly deals with the Wi-Fi signals being broadcast to and from any particular network node, mostly focusing instead on the node-to-node handoffs as LAN clients move through the network.

The results? Supplier-to-supplier and product-to-product enclosure and other cosmetics differences, but based on essentially the same underlying hardware, differentiated by software (along with, for example, antenna type and quantity and DRAM capacity variations), as each company strives to differentiate in any (preferably low-cost) way possible to squeeze whatever profit is left from an increasingly mature market. Sometimes, product line diversification (as we’ll see today) involves little more than new stickers on the outside of the device and packaging and an altered product name embedded in the firmware. And all this tweaking ends up causing ongoing stress headaches for each company’s pitiable product line managers.

Prepping for a sooner-or-later home office LAN transition

Today’s analysis is a prescient example of what I’m conceptually talking about…two examples, although, at least for the foreseeable future, you’ll only be seeing the insides of one of them. At the tail end of one of my writeups from late last year, wherein I unsuccessfully (to date, at least) strove to figure out how to eliminate my LAN’s ongoing dependence on the lightning-sensitive spans of wired Ethernet running around the outside of my house, I mentioned that:

I also plan to eventually try out newer Wi-Fi technology, to further test the hypothesis that “wires beat wireless every time”. Nearing 3,000 words, I’ll save more details on that for another post to come.

That “newer Wi-Fi technology” isn’t the primary focus of this post, either, but for now I’ll at least provide an entrée. Right now, I’m running a multi-node LAN mesh based on Google Nest Wifi routers, which implement Wi-Fi 5 (802.11ac) technology, specifically AC2200 4×4:4 albeit absent MU-MIMO. One other important “twist” here is that the backhaul connection between the network nodes is wired Ethernet, not Wi-Fi. The setup’s been operational for three years now, thankfully running quite stably, actually.

But, as with its OnHub predecessors (one of which, from TP-Link, I tore down back in mid-2020) I’d run in a mesh configuration for the prior five years, Google will eventually end support for Google Nest Wifi in favor of the newer Nest Wifi Pro and its potential successors. Indicative of my forecast, Google already pulled both the Nest Wifi and prior-gen Google Wifi (one of which I dissected back in early 2022) from its online store effective the beginning of 2024 (I plan to dissect a Nest Wifi post-support cessation).

At that point, I’ll need to upgrade my LAN once again. Fortunately, I’ve already got the successors in hand…a bunch of them, actually, counting spares. Last September (as well as several times prior, which I hadn’t noticed at the time), Amazon subsidiary Woot sold factory-refurbished Linksys LN1301 routers for $14.99 each (plus $5 off one via a coupon code):

Also known as the MX4300, it’s a beefy Wi-Fi 6 AX4200 unit with one WAN and three LAN wired Ethernet ports, along with a USB 3.0 port, based on a 1.4 GHz quad-core CPU (identity to be revealed shortly) and with 2 GBytes of RAM and 1 GByte of flash memory. It supports both MU-MIMO and OFDMA and claims to deliver up to 4.2 Gbps of aggregate wireless bandwidth.

Linksys also refers to it as a “Tri-band” router, although given that it’s not a Wi-Fi 6E device, this doesn’t mean that it supports the newest 6 GHz Wi-Fi band. Instead, it concurrently supports two different 5 GHz band ranges, one predominantly intended for optional node-to-node wireless mesh backhaul interconnect (with wired Ethernet being the other backhaul option).

Speaking of mesh, here’s the kicker…well, one of the two. Although not advertised as being mesh-compatible, it turns out that if, after you set up the primary router, you then direct-connect other secondary “child” units to it, an undocumented setup menu screen enables activating mesh connectivity between them. And (here’s the other kicker), the LN1301/MX4300 is also supported by both the DD-WRT and OpenWRT open-source communities, providing ongoing-maintained options to Linksys’ closed-source and (likely) end-of-life’d firmware.

To that “end-of-life” note, the fundamental reason why Linksys was selling the LN1301/MX4300 so inexpensively, it turns out, was as an inventory purge; the company then dropped the device (originally intended for use by small businesses, not consumers) from its product line. Upfront suspecting that this was the case, I went ahead and purchased the maximum quantity of ten units per Woot account, and then also asked my wife to pick up another one (using the same $5-off quantity-one coupon) from her Woot account. That’ll give me plenty of units for both my current four-node mesh topology and as-needed spares…and eventually I may decide to throw caution to the wind and redirect one of the spares to a (presumed destructive) teardown, too.

Disassembling a more modest sibling

For now, I’ll focus my teardown attention on an alternative, more humbly equipped Linksys router I subsequently acquired. A month after my LN1301/MX4300 binge, Woot sold a two-pack of factory-refurbished Velop (Linksys’ brand name for its mesh-compatible devices) VLP01 AC1200 routers for $19.99, minus another $5-off coupon, therefore $14.99 plus tax. VLP0102, by the way, is Linksys’ naming scheme for the two-pack…VLP0101 is the single-unit kit, while VLP0103 refers to the three-device mesh bundled variant. Stock images to start:

Walmart’s website indicates that the VLP01 was (it’s now out of stock and presumably EOL’d as well) a Walmart-exclusive product, which explains why you can’t find a dedicated product page for it on Linksys’ own website. Instead, there’s the WHW01 series, spec’d as AC1300 devices. Anyhoo, what prompted my acquisition was three main motivations:

They were inexpensive, and I already had plenty of LN1301/MX4300s, so I could rationalize devoting one of them to a teardown
Since I planned on doing wired backhaul anyway, I didn’t need super-robust wireless capabilities, particularly at the mesh node in my wife’s office, and
This (grammatically-tweaked-by-me) thread at the Woot Forum page caught my eye:
- Can these be meshed with the previous $15 Linksys router deal (Linksys LN1301 WiFi 6 Router)?
- Couldn’t find a direct answer on the Linksys site, but someone asked this same question on Reddit, and Linksys answered: “All of our intelligent mesh systems are compatible with each other. Just ensure that you designate the one with superior specifications as the parent or main node.”
- Yes, you can. I did this. You will need [to set up] the LN1301 as the parent and then set these up as the [child] nodes.

This support page on the Linksys website documents and supports the Woot forum claim.

Packaging and contents preliminaries

Now for some images of our patient, beginning with an outer box shot of what I got…which, I’ve just noticed, claims that it’s an AC2400 configuration (I’m guessing this is because Linksys is mesh-adding the two devices’ theoretical peak bandwidths together? Lame, Linksys, lame…):

Speaking of which, here are those two devices:

Along with what’s underneath ‘em:

Wall wart first, as usual, accompanied by a 0.75″ (19.1 mm) diameter U.S. penny for size comparison purposes:

Now for the router itself:

“Only” one LAN port this time, along with the WAN port and power input connector:

Onward:

Status LED up top, along with an abundance of (passive; no fan in this design) ventilation holes:

And at the bottom, power and reset switches along with verbiage including the all-important FCC ID, Q87-03331, which interestingly (and unsurprisingly) documents this product as being the WHW01, not the Walmart-relabeled and (slightly) de-spec’d VLP01:

Diving inside

Ordinarily, I would have begun my search for a pathway to the interior by focusing on that bottom panel, but an iFixit teardown of the WHW01 that I’d stumbled across during my research (which, truth be told, I actually didn’t realize until my teardown was complete and I’d begun this writeup was of the same hardware, due to the product name variance and “AC2400” silliness) instead advised me to start at the top instead:

Top off and to the side, complete with flips and focus shifts:

Now standalone:

Next, let’s ditch those two screws:

And now we can (re)turn our attention to the bottom. As usual, the rubber feet are first to go, revealing screw heads underneath ‘em:

Buh-bye:

And we have liftoff:

Another set of flips and focus shifts:

Followed by more standalone shots:

And now, free of its upper and lower encumbrances, the inner assembly lifts right out:

Gotta love those focus shifts! The enclosure’s just so tall, don’cha know:

Clever cooling and wireless connectivity

The inner assembly exhibits some pretty nifty engineering. There’s a metal plate on top of one side of the PCB, a finned heat sink on the other side surrounded by a plastic shroud (to which the Bluetooth antenna is attached), and a plastic grill (that you sorta already saw already from those previous inside-from-top still-assembled shots) on the top end with the 2.4 and 5 GHz antennae stuck to it and the LED mini-PCB inserted within it. Side shots first:

Top end:

And bottom end:

Let’s ditch the plastic piece around the Ethernet ports and power connector first. It unclipped and pulled right off with absolutely no fuss:

Removing three screws enables the extrication of the metal plate on one side of the PCB:

Don’t worry; I’ll be getting to those two Faraday cages shortly:

But first, I want to get the topside plastic grill and the other-side plastic shroud off:

The two Wi-Fi antennas’ connections are begging for unclipping:

There’s the LED mini-PCB, still in place:

And there we are:

Some standalone shots of the top-end grill piece, topside first:

Then the underside:

Now the four…err…side sides:

I’m guessing that “P2” references the 2.4 GHz antenna structure, while “P5” is for…err, again…5 GHz. Agree or disagree, readers?

Next up, the side shroud. Outer portion first, revealing (among other things) the aforementioned Bluetooth antenna:

And now the inside:

Next, the LCD mini-PCB.

The largest chip on this side is labeled as follows:

9633
11 02
D819

My guess is that it’s an LED driver, like this PCA9633 from NXP Semiconductors. And on the other side is, of course, the multicolor LED itself:

From the online documentation for the WHW01 (which, I’m guessing, works the same as the VLP01):

Blue (blinking): Node is starting up
Blue (solid): Node is working properly
Purple (blinking): Node is paired with phone for setup
Purple (solid): Node is ready for setup
Red (blinking): Node lost connection to the primary node
If this is your primary node, ensure it’s securely connected to your modem
Red (solid): Node lost internet connection
Yellow (solid): Node is too far from another Velop node

And speaking of which, here’s a link to the PDF of the WHW01 user guide, which also references the VLP01 on the cover page!

Next up, let’s get that big finned heatsink off:

Fortunately, with all the retaining screws now removed, it lifted right off straightaway:

Oh, goodie, two more Faraday cages underneath!

Let’s deal with these first, before returning to the two on the other side that we saw before:

Remove the thermal tape from the inside of one, bend back the other…

And surprisingly, at least to me, the system SoC is not on this (formerly finned heatsink-augmented) side of the PCB. On the left is a Winbond W632GU6MB-12 2 Gbit DDR3 SDRAM. And on the right is a CSR (now Qualcomm) 8811 Bluetooth 4.2 controller, unsurprising given the antenna connector’s proximity to it.

There’s one more chip I want to point out on this side of the PCB, at the bottom:

It’s a Macronix MX25L1606E 16 Mbit serial NOR flash memory. (Briefly) hold that thought

Multiple nonvolatile memories

Wrapping up, let’s revisit the PCB’s other side, this time post-removal of the black plastic pieces:

At the top is another Winbond device, this time a serial NAND flash memory chip, the 2 Gbit 25M02GV. It’s based on high-reliability SLC (single-level cell) technology, and given comparative capacity, I’m guessing it contains the bulk of system software, with the Macronix chip on the other side relegated to boot and recovery code (or something like that…mebbe it holds updatable configuration data instead, although EEPROM would seem to be a superior choice?).

Cage tops off…

Along the left:

are (top-to-bottom) two Skyworks SKY85330-11 2.4GHz 256QAM RF front-end modules (FEMs), followed by two chips labeled:

SKY
748
2K01D

WikiDevi (or if you prefer, DeviWiki) says that they’re Skyworks SKY7482I001 5 GHz FEMs, although I can’t find such a chip on Skyworks’ website, so once again… I’m pretty sure they’re right about the 5 GHz FEM part, but I’m questioning the specific part number…then again, I can’t find an online reference to the SKY7482K01D, either. My working theory is that we’re actually looking at the SKY85748-11, and Skyworks just didn’t have room to print the “85” portion of the part number on the package.

To their right, and formerly under two pads of thermal tape, one connecting the cage to the metal plate and the other between the cage and IC, is the dominant heat generator of the design, Qualcomm’s IPQ4018 dual-band 802.11ac controller, which also handles wired Ethernet MAC duties. To its right is the companion Qualcomm Atheros QCA8072 dual-port Ethernet PHY. So basically what we’ve got here is a Linksys-branded and software-customized Qualcomm reference design. And above the QC8072 (and below the two wired Ethernet ports) is the Link-PP HN36201CG dual-port transformer module. There’s nothing notable under the sheet metal square in between the IPQ4018 and QCA8072, by the way, in case you were wondering.

More than 2,500 words in, that’s “all” I’ve got for you today. There’s another surprise waiting in the wings, but I’ll save that for another teardown another (near-future, I promise) day. Until then, please share your thoughts with me (and your fellow readers) in the comments!

—Brian Dipert is the Editor-in-Chief of the Edge AI and Vision Alliance, and a Senior Analyst at BDTI and Editor-in-Chief of InsideDSP, the company’s online newsletter.

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A fresh gander at a mesh router