Networking

I’ve been running Tomato for several years on an Asus WL-520GU router. Tomato is a firmware replacement with similar features to DD-WRT, but simpler to configure. I recently upgraded to an Asus RT-N10P router. It wasn’t the WL-520GU’s limitation to wireless G speeds that was bothering me. It was the fact that I could never achieve the full 50 mbps broadband speed my ISP now offers. I knew the higher speeds were possible, because Speedtest measured that high when I plugged my laptop directly into the cable modem.

I’ve gone through hardware routers at the rate of about one a year, primarily cheap brands like D-Link and Airlink. They were inexpensive in dollars yet costly in terms of the time I spent wrestling with their limitations. They rarely locked up but were often a bottleneck. Streaming a TV show or sports event from the internet made my cable internet feel like dial-up. I kept buying newer models, hoping to find a satisfactory one.

There’s not much work to installing and using a typical hardware router. Just plug it in, attach cables from your non-wireless computers, and it will automatically connect them to the internet without any special configuration. That’s because the out-of-the-box router/firewall acts as both a DHCP server and DNS relay. The DHCP server assigns a unique private IP address like “192.168.0.101” to each device on your local network (which is often called a “subnet”, but here I’ll call it the “LAN”); the DNS relay forwards requests for any internet address like “mail.