I’ll be trying to set up Internet access for my mother soon, so I went out today to buy a wireless router for her. But as I was researching, I wondered hey, why should she get a better router than me, since most of them are Wireless N and gigabit nowadays and mine wasn’t. So I ended up buying a new one for myself instead and she can have my old one. Hey, she won’t know the difference…
I wound up picking up the Linksys WRT310N, since it’s the easiest one to get hold of around here that’s still hackable. I would have preferred something like the WRT610N, with its dual radios and USB support, but it’s still a work-in-progress for custom firmwares. The 310N’s not supported in Tomato though, so I’m back to using DD-WRT instead. It doesn’t really matter now that DD-WRT has bandwidth monitoring as well, since that was why I switched to Tomato way back when.
The performance is definitely improved over the old one. Wireless, I can get around 40-50 Mbps, versus maybe 25-30 before. And wired I can do 160-200 Mbps, which isn’t coming close to maxing out the Ethernet speed like I could before, but is still a decent improvement over the old 100 Mbps. I might actually be bottlenecked by the SSH encryption speed there. It’ll take a while to see how the reliability is, though. It’s not on the 5 GHz band since I need compatibility with 11g, so I’m still subject to all the same old possible interference. It’ll be nice if I can reliably stream MythTV…