Well I finally got sick of the glitchiness of my old Linksys router. Every once in a while it just ‘goes away’ and has to be power cycled, and it’s annoying when it happens while I’m at work and still need to access something at home.
Doing research on routers is usually a big pain, but this time I went with some recommendations and got the ASUS RT-N66U. Besides just generally good reviews, it’s one of the models that works well with TomatoUSB, and I’ve had good luck with the Tomato firmware in the past, so the first thing I did was replace the standard firmware with that via these instructions. It’s a bit trickier with this model since you have to use an external utility to flash the firmware, so there’s a slightly higher chance of turning it into an expensive brick, but it went pretty smoothly.
Only time will tell as far as reliability goes, but it’s nice to finally be able to use the 5GHz band separately, as it’s much less congested around here. Being an apartment and condo-dense area, there’s a crazy number of APs around here, and the status page for the 2.4GHz radio says “Interference level: Severe”. I’ll also have to fiddle with the QoS and USB options at some point.