I wanted to show you some of the cooler features of Tomato. One of my favorite features is the router will display other nearby routers and the channel they are using. This will allow you to select a channel that has the least traffic and thereby eliminate or reduce conflicts. In the following screenshot, at the bottom you can see the list of other wireless routers. There are 3 APs (access points, a.k.a. wireless routers) on channel 1, six on channel 6, and one on channel 11. This makes it easy to pick the best channel for my area.
This next screenshot shows the bandwidth graphs. You can view graphs for real-time as well as 24 hour traffic, and totals for daily, weekly, and monthly. Useful if you need to track your usage, and just cool to look at.
On the advanced wireless page you can set things like "Afterburning" which is a burst protocol to increase wireless throughput, and increase the transmission power. The default was 42 mW, I increased mine slightly to 50mW. I guess anything up to 70 or so is fine, but beyond that it's self defeating as the broadcast strength causes reflections and a loss of signal.
And on this final page you can view graphs showing you the break down of your traffic according to your QoS rules. For me, I don't have any QoS rules right now, so the graph merely shows 100% of my traffic is unclassified.
Hopefully this has whet your appetite to try a 3rd-party firmware on your router. I've only been running Tomato for about 1 month now, but it's been working flawlessly. I've heard reports that DD-WRT has a tendency to randomly lockup, but I haven't had a single issue.
I've been using Tomato and/or DD-WRT for at least the last 6 years. First on my old Linksys WRT54G router and then my Linksys WRT320N. I have a new Linksys E4200 router that yet doesn't support DD-WRT yet, otherwise I'd have it installed on my system.
ReplyDeleteI don't see why Linksys doesn't just use DD-WRT as the basis for their firmware.