I've read the sticky above regarding the best wireless routers but there is no mention of the Linksys WRT54GC
(http://www.ascent.co.nz/productspecification.aspx?ItemID=345815). Is this any good? I'm on TLC cable using a SB5101 BTW.
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Ragnor: Depends if you are comfortable updating the firmware on the device and playing around with settings. Do you want something you can play around with and get more features and a better end result or do you just want something that works with minimal effort?
Note: A large range of wireless routers use the same family of Broadcom chipset for the controller so you can look at more than just Linksys models. Tomato and DD-WRT v24 work on a Asus WLG520GU (http://www.ascent.co.nz/productspecification.aspx?ItemID=361718) for example.
Check the Tomato and DD-WRT sites for a full list of supported devices.
Tomato Firmware: http://www.polarcloud.com/tomato
DD-WRT: http://www.dd-wrt.com/dd-wrtv3/index.php
Ragnor: There are a whole bunch of things the custom firmware improves over the factory one, I would say the top 3 would be:
1) Improved admin UI
2) Decent bandwidth monitoring / tracking / graphs etc
3) Better QoS settings
Check out the screenshots and video on this page for the Tomato firmware and compare to say the user guide pdf for the WRT54GC from this page
Ragnor: Tomato has only been verified/tested on those models listed under the "Routers that are known to work with Tomato" section on the tomato page.
DD-WRT has a much larger list of supported/tested devices, you could check here:
http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Supported_Devices
There are two different versions of the Tomato firmware for the devices it supports (different chipsets) and there are many different versions of DD-WRT for the large amount of devices (chipsets) it supports.
In my opinion a lot of the newer models/revisions are actually worse than the earlier models they've had their ram and flash cut back to reduce costs and I guess increase profits per unit.
I think right now the Asus WL-520GU is very good value (~$90 from Ascent), the default firmware isn't too bad and you could always try Tomato, DD-WRT or Open WRT on it later on if you felt like it. The 520GU does seem to be supported by the main three third party firmares (no USB in Tomato though).
One thing you didn't mention... Do you need/want 802.11n (145Mbit) wireless or are you fine with 802.11g (54Mbit) and 802.11b support? Do any of computers/laptops wireless cards support 802.11n?
rscole86: That will depend on your modem and set up. Remembering that it is only a router, and there is no modem built in.
I am using mine with a draytek modem, and works fine.
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