Home Routers

I’ve had home wifi routers from both LinkSys (later bought out by Cisco) and Netgear and been underwhelmed with both. Poor wifi range, dropped connections, etc.

Recently Cisco attempted an evil change of terms & conditions on people who already own their routers, so they might be a firm to avoid if at all possible.

I’ve not owned a D-Link router. They may be OK I suppose.

However, Jeff Atwood recommends using open firmware, such as DD-WRT, OpenWRT & Tomato, because it’s better quality and can be fixed & upgraded. The off-the-shelf stuff can also, in theory, but why would Cisco, etc, spend time making the thing you already bought better, when you could be out buying a more up-to-date version instead?

I’m especially interested in QoS, so I can prioritise Xbox gaming traffic, for example. I’d also like to explore the option of a private VPN. Some decent traffic logging would also be useful.

So, I guess I better see if my current routers will work with one of these.