COVID19 and Stay-at-Home orders make performing this moderately difficult and time consuming procedure make sense.
At the end of 2014, T-Mobile announced the TM-AC1900 Wireless Router as a solution for T-Mobile customers with poor or no cell coverage at their homes. Although named The T-Mobile Personal CellSpot, the device was not a cellular modem or fentocell. It was a rebranded Asus RT-AC68U WiFi router that could be used with cell phones that supported “WiFi calling” The Asus hardware was and still is a solid router and it was offered for a fraction of the price of the Asus branded model. However the firmware that came with the TM-AC1900 lacked some of the features of the regular Asus firmware and quickly became insecure and obsolete when the T-Mobile firmware locked out simple firmware replacement and stopped providing updates.
Keeping network devices secure and up to date is critical for any installation – home or business. Current owners of the TM-AC1900 with original firmware have two options:
- Send it to the electronic recycler
- Perform a moderately difficult update to current RT-AC68U firmware.
Considering the low purchase price and the time required to perform the update, option 1 would make the most sense. The COVID19 pandemic and Stay-at-Home orders made option 2 a reasonable alternative.
I used the method described on the Bay Area Tech Pros website. The procedure on the site uses Windows. Mac users will need to modify some of the steps described in a video by lyingRich on YouTube.
I ran into a problem with the router supporting an older and no longer supported ssh encryption which I needed to allow –
-oKexAlgorithms=+diffie-hellman-group1-sha1 admin@192.168.x.x
Worst case you can send it to the electronics recycler.