My WRT54G is dead and I need to go buy a replacement tomorrow.

I want something I can just plug in and it will work I am not going to install any 3rd party firmware or any other hacks. With the current Linksys the only settings I changed were the admin password, and the SSID. Oh and I guess I was using open DNS too.

So any recommendations ? Is Linksys any good now after the Cisco buyout ?

I only need G for wireless I'll take N but I would rather get something cheaper.

Right now I am plugged directly into the cable modem so I am probably getting infected with something as I type this

I'm still a Linksys fan, but that's mostly because I do the whole replacement firmware thing To that end, my favorite router is still the WRT54GL.

I'm hoping that one day the Tomato guys will get into hacking the WRT160NL...

If you have any Apple equipment, I'd recommend an Airport now that Snow Leopard has Wake on Demand. Other routers might implement it in time (as it is an open spec addition to dns-sd), but for now the Apple ones are the only ones.

I'd also recommend making sure it's dual band if you have any N equipped machines and live in a crowded wireless space. I have all my computers on 5ghz now, and it makes a big difference since it can easily run 2 channels for the full speed. In the 2ghz range, too much interferes with getting decent speeds.

One other thing to consider is if you want to attach storage or a printer to the router and have it shared out over the network.

So is it true the WRT54GL would be bad with the stock firmware like the newegg reviews say ? Is the stock firmware different than the WRT54G ?

I wonder what the WIFI range is like on something like the WRT54G2 with no external antennas ?

What is wake on demand ?

I have no apple stuff just XP and I only have one laptop with G everything else is wired. I figured I would just get a cheaper G one but what is dual band N ?

The storage think might be interesting but I doubt I would ever actually do it. My network stuff is in the dirty old basement so I can't see putting a HDD down there. Not printer at home it's cheaper to print at work

Ok I looked up what dual band is so I would want that if I had multiple laptops with different WiFi standard levels I guess ?

Yes, but you don't, so you don't need it.


I'm not sure what they mean by that. As far as I've seen, it's pretty much exactly like all the other Linksys router firmwares. It's possible that they just mean relative to the replacement firmwares or something like that.

How big a place do you have? Do you ever carry your laptop to a part of your home that your current router couldn't reach? If so, you might want to be able to replace the firmware. You wouldn't believe how much you can jack up the signal power with the WRT54GL, and how absolutely easy it is with the Tomato firmware. You just change one number and you're good to go!

My first WRT54G (one of the original Linux ones) died on me and was replaced by a WRT54GL. I would have never replaced it with another Linksys router were it not able to take 3rd party firmware.

If you just want something cheap just buy whatever you find at the lowest price. They should all work reasonably well. But my suggestion would be to get the WRT54GL and put the Tomato firmware on it. You don't need to make any further adjustments beyond the few you would make to the stock firmware. It's just a better performing system with a much easier to use UI.

The house is 2K square feet and with the location of the current setup I can't get more than 50 feet from the router. I never had a problem with signal strength with the old router.

Newegg review

So Tomato won't run on a WRT54G2 right ? It seems like that is the one the local places have. (best buy and walmart)

Pretty much. 802.11 B and G run at 2.4 ghz, and have 11 channels, though only room for 3 without overlap. 802.11 A runs at 5ghz, and has many more channels, but never really caught on.

802.11 N allows operation in either 2.4 or 5ghz range, and a dual band router can run in both at the same time. This allows for someone to keep legacy B/G devices around while also migrating newer devices to N in the 5ghz range. N also allows 2 channels to be tied together for higher speeds, and this is where having the 5ghz frequency helps. With more channels, it's much easier to find 2 without interfering with someone else's router.

As others have pointed out, you really won't see any benefit from an N router currently, and definitely not a dual band one.

As for Wake on Demand, it's a feature Apple systems support with Snow Leopard. Basically it allows a machine to go to sleep, and still have the network services it provides show up on the network. IE, if I have my desktop setup to share files to my laptop, my laptop always sees the desktop on the network even if it's asleep. If I try to connect to the desktop to grab a file, the desktop comes out of sleep mode. The really convenient thing for me with this setup is that it works over the internet as well via Back to my Mac. So I can click on my home desktop from my work machine, and grab files even if it was asleep. There are other ways to achieve the same thing, but this method is completely seamless. With the whole move to green datacenters, I wouldn't be surprised to see something similar there in the coming years. File servers could enter sleep mode when everyone has left the office, but come back online when someone needs a file the next morning, all without manual schedules or additional programs needed on the client side.

I know jack all about Minnesota geography, but going by your location in your profile, it appears that you have a Micro Center near you (that's just a city-to-city mapping, no addresses).

I also can't speak to your store's stock either, but my local Micro Center has the WRT54GL. It doesn't show up in either store's online catalog, but I know for a fact that it's in mine. They had about 20 of them last I looked.

I would say that the NewEgg reviewers say to pick the WRT54G over the WRT54GL if you want to use the stock firmware merely since it's cheaper. The extra RAM/flash (the difference between the G and GL) is more useful for Tomato, DD-WRT and the like. Simple as that... I would guess the stock firmware is largely identical between the two.

My WRT54G seems to be having hardware issues so I'm in a similar position. I'd be looking to get two N devices. An access point and a client bridge since I use it to make my MythTV box accessible. HD can't stream over 802.11g even with good signal strength.

Yeah we have on but I found the same thing you did, they don't have them online. I may be able to check them out it depends on where I end up today.

Ah, we're in the same boat. I'm considering getting a cheap 802.11G router and have a makeshift dual-band. At the moment I have two Airport Extremes, one being a wireless bridge, essentially, which I plug my Tivo and my bluray player into. Right now they're both on N and G, but I'd love to get them on N exclusively to try to boost the performance of video transfers to my Tivo.

Random observation from when I replaced my D-Link DGL-4300 "gaming router" plus cheapo Motorola DSL box, with a Netgear DGN-2000 (all-in-one DSL + router + wifi).

The D-Link had gigabit, but not jumbo packets. This was still a significant performance feature when I was running my ReadyNAS file server, since replaced by just adding more disks to my Mac. The new router is "only" 100Mbit, but that hasn't been a problem.

The D-link had 802.11g with one external antenna. I had replaced that with a larger, longer-range antenna, but it still didn't reach from one corner of the house, where I had it, to the other corner. (No biggie. I got a D-Link DAP-1522, which has a four-port GigE switch and is a not-simultaneous dual-band 802.11n access point and connected that via wire.)

In my new world, the Netgear, with two antennas and 802.11n (2.4GHz only) covers the whole house, rendering the DAP-1522 access point not terribly necessary any more, although I suppose it means that devices can lower their transmit power when they're near it.

I will point out that ditching the Motorola DSL modem for the modem built into the Netgear was a world of difference. Much more stable connections.

With regard to dual-band, consider it to be a non-feature unless it's advertised as "simultaneous dual band." My DAP-1522 has a software switch for 2.4GHz vs. 5GHz. I tried it both ways, talking to my MacBook Air. At 5GHz, with less than ten feet of air between the laptop and the base station, even surfing the web didn't work well. Things like YouTube were hopeless. Switching to 2.4GHz, it worked like a champ. I later met a resesarcher who does antennas and asked about why this could be. Simply, they're most likely taking an antenna designed for 2.4GHz and shoving 5GHz through it. That gives them a checkbox, but doesn't yield a workable feature.

One caveat about the Netgear: when less than six months old, the wired ports all fried themselves, high packet drop rates, etc. Netgear shipped me a new one, which is now running just fine, but the router is quite hot to the touch. I fear it's not going to last very long.

I'm not 100% what you're saying here. Are you talking about the router that just died and one before it?

Regardless, if you get the WRT54GL and put Tomato on there, you'll be able to boost the signal strength so people two doors down will see it (or not, it's up to you ).


Ah, it took me a couple readings of that to see what they mean. The L version is generally about $10-30 more expensive than the non-L version, depending on where you get it. That reviewer isn't saying the stock firmware on one is better than the other, he's just saying (rightly so, IMO), that if you're not going to flash it, just get the cheaper one.

And I'd say that if you're not going to flash it, just get the cheapest 802.11g router you can find (as long as it has WPA/WPA2). They'll all do the job these days.

Speaking of which, does anyone have a recommendation for an 802.11n access point (or router — I can just not use the router parts; I'm happy with my Tomato) that functions at 5GHz? It can be 5GHz-only as far as I'm concerned.

I live in a townhouse near a shopping center and I can regularly see a dozen WiFi networks, and I'm tired of them clobbering mine. It would be nice to have the extra speed, but I'm really more interested in the non-conflicting frequency range. But if it doesn't work well, I might as well stick with g. (And I'm not interested in dropping back to 11Mbps with a, not that I have any adapters for that anyway.)

Netgear can't make a decent AP or router in my opinion. Every single one I've used has died a mysterious death. Thats not including the terrible firmware in them which is highly unstable.

The only Netgear item I'd willingly buy are the metal cased unmanaged switches.

I've got a couple Cisco 1252s but they're probably a little over the top for your purposes.


Whats the composition of your house? 5GHz even with 802.11n doesn't have a massive range and can be shielded pretty easily if your house has a lot of metal parts in the walls.


802.11a does 54Mbps.

Maybe a D-Link DAP-2553? $130 or thereabouts.

EDIT: this is another one of those "selectable" dual-band things, which you don't really want. You're really getting a 2.4GHz box that will at best fake it as a 5GHz box.

The Netgear WNHDE111 (802.11a/n, 5GHz only), for $55 at Amazon, may be the way to go for a cheap 5GHz access point.

Yeah, I was hoping to pay a little less than $700.


As with most houses in the US, stick-built. The only things in the walls are pine, gypsum, paper, wires, nails, and screws.


Brainfart. Still, no adapters.

I was talking about the newly dead WRT54G. I paid too much and got the WRT54GL at Microcenter (their website sucks !). It was 20 dollars cheaper on newegg but I didn't want to wait.

I don't think I will install anything on it the stock firmware seems to be working fine now.

Yeah, Micro Center is weird. Most stuff is as overpriced as you'll find at any brick and mortar computer store, but then they'll have tons of loss leaders. I got all my components at Newegg except for the CPU its self, which was $30 cheaper at MC than anywhere online.

In case you decide to put Tomato on your new router (which really is the reason to get the L version), just know that it's really easy to do. You can find it here.

I use dd-wrt on te same box and have been really pleased with the reliabiltity of it since upgrading. We used to have to power cycle the unit every day but now the only downtime we've had had been power supply related.

dd-wrt is good too. I was just suggesting Tomato because of the simplicity. Both of obtaining it (I hate dd-wrt's download area - I never know which one to get), and the (IMO) much better UI.

By the way, increasing the power output of the WRT54G(L) units beyond about 70mW is asking for trouble. The extra heat generated can/will damage the RF frontend. So don't just crank it to maximum...

I notice that Tomato defaults to 42mW. That's enough for me.

Also cranking power ouptut doesn't increase receiver sensitivity so if the other end of the link (laptop etc) doesn't have enough power you're wasting your time.

Tomatoe was on my list of firmwares to try, but since I had to get the thing up and running quickly I didn't have chance to try anything other than dd-wrt.

We actually turned the output power to about half the normal level which made the connections more reliable. Probably cutting down on excessive reflections.

I read a forum posting someplace saying this as well. They were saying the signal gets distorted when you increase it and makes the connection less reliable.

I don't doubt that you're correct about this, but I've never experienced it personally, and I've installed a couple dozen of these. The church I do tech support for has two of them installed, and one of them has been running at maximum for a couple years now. If it dies, it's a mere $50-70 to replace it. That's worth it when you get reliable internet access throughout the entire building. And it is reliable. I haven't seen any issues on that end either...