Advice on a replacement home office 802.11G router?

[bjarvis]

My old Linksys wireless router died a couple of weeks ago. It was a reliable and functional unit so I decided to replace it with another Linksys unit, esp. since I could just dash down the street to Staples.

Bad move. The WRK54G isn't behaving well. It drops incoming connections, has a high rate of packet loss and is generally very slow in operation. In general, it performs incredibly poorly when compared to its late predecessor.

Anyone have a model of wireless router they would recommend?

Comments

[urbear]

I've used a number of Linksys routers, and all of them seem to have a problem that's also occasionally found in other brands: the router tends to crash with heavy use. This behavior seems to be related to connection table clean-up; it appears that if your machines make connections to many, many outside systems (during a Bittorrent download, for instance) over a relatively short period (on the order of four or five days) a table overflows and everything grinds to an immediate stop.

Linksys also makes a solution to the problem: a series of routers than run Linux internally, and can accept alternative firmware. There's a thriving cottage industry based on these devices and related products; you can get a feel for it on the forums maintained here.

I now use a Linksys WRT54GL router with an aftermarket firmware package called Talisman from a company by the name of Sveasoft. Not only does this package fix the connection problem, it allows you to tweak many router features that are normally inaccessible (like wireless transmit power) and offers some very useful additional features -- VLANs and VPNs, for instance. If Talisman isn't appropriate for some reason, there are many other open-source alternatives.

[bjarvis.livejournal.com]

Hmmm... I'll take a look into this! Thanks!