Let me edit this again...heh. I'm in the market for a new wireless router. I have one of the older Linksys 54G models running the dd-wrt firmware. I bought it about 6 years ago and it's time for a new one. Upstairs I have my PC and my XBOX360 plugged in back of the router. I use wireless for my laptop downstairs which uses 802.11b/g. I have shared folders so I have a password protected network. My ISP uses PPPoE which means I have to input a login and password in the router setup. Any tips? I guess N and N+ are useless since the only wireless device I use is 802.11g, correct? I'm seeing speeds of 54 Mbps, 108 Mbps, 300 Mbps, etc. Should I expect any increased performance from a higher Mbps router? I'm assuming that doing file transfers on my home network will be faster, but I don't know if it will actually affect the speed of my internet service when browsing or downloading, for example. I just did a speed test and I'm at 23 MB download and 6 MB upload. Thanks!
I have a 108Mbps MSI RG60SE at home and I found it great for the price. I have my computer plugged in back of it, as well as my sister's computer in the top floor of my house and my mother's computer (which is more than 25 meters away from the router) and all connect and work great with it. About the features, works great with PPPoE, 802.11b/g, and has WEP, WPA and WPA2 security features (which at least for me are very important since I have a computing school next to my house and many people went with their notebooks and... stole my bandwidth ). And about the performance, the speed depends of the router's antenna power as well as its speed, as it decreases with the distance you are from it. However, you will only notice the difference in the wireless connections.
It's confusing for me... I have my router plugged in and I did a speed test and got 23 MB download and 6 MB upload. I removed the router and plugged my PC directly into my ISP modem and did a speed test and got 15 MB download and 4 MB upload. But when surfing the internet the images appear much faster when I'm plugged directly into the modem and not the router. This is especially true for auction sites with lots of thumbnails....with the router the thumbs are slow to load, without it they all load instantly.
I'd like to suggest any tp-link wireless router, i've got a 108M one and a tp-link 108M wireless USB adapter which both were really cheap, i got the router after my d-link died (it was a pretty bad router anyway) and the usb adapter when i found out my asus pci card didn't work on vista. To be honest i was expecting them both to be really terrible and not work or work really badly but actually they do pretty well allowing me to get on the net easily even with my psp, i can also connect my DS to router for multiplayer without any problems only having to do the intial set up. I can't really comment on too many other brands and the d-link i did have was a few years back so they might work better now.
Unless you go N you're not going to see any increased speeds internally and even then, you're not likely to see an increase in Internet speed as the WRT-54G is still faster than a 20MBit+ Internet connection. You would need to double your 'net pipe in order to overload it. Two things to check: 1) Make sure you've got the latest version of DD-WRT installed 2) Make sure you're not blocking something unnecessairly at the router's firewall Remember, when you plug in the PC directly, you're bypassing the router firewall. Any PC behind the router won't need a firewall unless you're trying to shield it from other PC's on the local network. Finally, make sure your DNS servers are current. If you've got your router pointing to a slow DNS server that can cause issues. I always just point my to the OpenDNS servers. Hope this helps. -hl718
Hey guys Thanks for the answers so far. hl718....it looks like I'm using a dd-wrt version from 2006. I should probably start by downloading the new firware. The problem is...I'm not sure which one I need. All of the instructions for install are from the standard Linksys firmware. I can't seem to find instructions on upgrading my dd-wrt to a newer version of dd-wrt. I went to the dd-wrt webpage, but even there I can't seem to match up my router with the ones they have listed. I have a WRT54 v2. The closest thing listed is a WRT54GS_v2. I say "closest" because it's the only WRT model visted with a v2. They have that listed in both the "stable" and "v24-sp1" folders, so I'm not even sure which one is best for me even if I could match up my router. Any tips?
I've actually taken the question to the dd-wrt boards. Looks like it's going to take some digging for me to figure this out.
All you need to update firmware, at least from Linksys's website is the model number and version. There are like 8 different versions of the WRT54G routers.
