As i posted yesterday, i had to buy a new wireless router because my two years old Belkin F5D9230-4 started to give me problems 15-20 days ago. My HTTP traffic (mostly when browsing) was very intermittent and sometimes i had to hit F5 or Refresh many times in order to display a web page.

I began researching the new models from the most popular brands and i was pondering to buy a new pre-N router or an old one which costed much less. I have planned to build a HTPC (Home Theater PC) in the near future so i will eventually need a draft-N or pre-N router in order to stream content from my main PC to the HTPC i will have in the leaving room.

But as the N standard isn’t approved yet, i resolved to buy a cheaper one and when i need a new one, then i will buy it. This way i save save money now and i hope than when i need N speeds the standard will be certified already (or at least the price of routers will drop considerably).

It comes to Linksys (Cisco) faced some problems back in 2003 when they used open-source code in their routers and they didn’t make the code public, which was against the GNU General Public License.

I ended buying a Linksys WRT54GL because it allows me to install a variety of open-source firmware if i want to.

I stumbled upon a site where the author develops a firmware called Tomato for mainly a few Linksys and Buffalo routers. In that website were links to other open-source firmware projects. I learn about them all and choose to install Tomato in my new router.

Tomato has many advantages over the original Linksys firmware because it enables SpeedBooster, a feature that only a few Linksys models share and that enables the router to achieve greater speeds. It has bandwidth monitoring with graphics, port forwarding, and a set of features that lets that lets you tweak the router in any way you want. There is even the possibility to increase the power of the antennas so you can get better coverage. You can use custom CSS style sheets to change the appearance of the admin interface.

The main projects are Tomato, DD-WRT and OpenWRT. I choose Tomato. You can read about them and choose the one that supports your router if you want to try them out.

The installation couldn’t be easier. You just download the package and upload the proper *.bin file to your router. Then you just reboot the router and the new firmware is installed. You can now tweak everything you want.

Here is a site where you can see a live preview of the Tomato interface and the settings it has. I will make another post to talk about my Tomato experience along with resource links and FAQ’s if you want to know more about it.

Here’s a screenshot of my admin interface using Tomato with a custom style sheet.

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