A few months ago I "upgraded" my old Linksys WRT54g that was running ddwrt to a very highly recommended and reviewed Trendnet TEW-692. I did this because I wanted to take advantage of all the N devices we have running. I quickly came to realize what a POS the trendnet is. Its simultaneous connections capability is abysmal, so if I tried to use bit torrent at all, it would freeze the whole network. My pings in games were much worse than before, and the very thing I bought it for (the N wifi speed) didn't work very well either. The range was terrible, and I was not a happy camper. I was so upset that I decided to build my own wireless router. I really loved my old linksys but I also really wanted good wireless speed for my non gaming computers and devices.
Its basically an old 775 Core2Duo with a couple gigs of ram, a laptop hard drive, and 2 Intel GB NICs paired up with a high powered wireless N card from MicroTik, and some fairly large antennas. For my operating system I used RouterOS from MicroTik. After a lot of reading and figuring out how to configure a non consumer router, I was able to setup everything exactly the way I want it. I figured out how to setup traffic shaping so I can run bit torrent and play games at the same time without any problems at all. My download speed got about 5 megabits quicker than before, and was almost identical to if I had my cable modem directly plugged in to my computer. With the default power output, my wifi reaches about 8 houses down the street, so I turned it down a bit. Overall I freakin love it. For a normal user it might be a bit overkill, but if you have a ton of networked devices running simultaneously, an anemic consumer router just might not be able to catch up.
Although not scientific, here is a screenshot of what my netstatus looks like in AH while downloading 3 things in bit torrent....
On my old Linksys I would not have a flatline, but it would have very tiny variations, and overall it was quite stable. On my Trendnet router, the ping would be all over the place, and forget about trying to play when there was a lot of heavy traffic on the network. I have noticed a huge differnce in internet latency. Web pages are served up so much faster than before. Overall everything is night and day better than the Trendnet, and noticeably better than my old Linksys. Is there a consumer level wireless router out there that can match the performance of my new setup? It is possible. I might have been able to find something prebuilt that suits my needs, but I am still really glad I did this because I learned a heck of a lot and it was also fun. If you have a less than understanding Girlfriend or Wife you may want to make it a little smaller than I made mine
