Ask Slashdot: Life Beyond the WRT54G Series? 427
First time accepted submitter jarmund (2752233) writes "I first got a WRT54GL in 2007. Now, 7 years later, it's still churning along, despite only having one of its antennae left after an encounter with a toddler. As it is simply not up to date to today's standards (802.11N for example), what is a worthy successor? I enjoyed the freedom to choose the firmware myself (I've run Tomato on it since 2008), in addition to its robustness. A replacement will be considered second-rate unless it catered for the same freedom as its predecessor." Is there a canonical best household router nowadays?
+1 for this Post (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Option: Linksys WRT1900ac (Score:5, Insightful)
The canonical best household router is (Score:2, Insightful)
Apple's AirPort.
Fixed-function devices are the only way to go - set it and forget it, man.
You don't have to hack them, you don't have to bother them. I've had mine for about 10 years now, to replace my old 1st-gen WRT54g, where I was doing stupid shit like trying to build an HTTP & media server into it, which was a conceptually flawed idea for an wireless-access-point.
You should never make devices more complicated than their physical requirements.
The problem a lot of people have is that they believe a device should do more, instead of less. This is the feature-creep that cause devices to be badly designed and complicated.
Apple has they user-experience model down in their Airport, where they say "Nope. Just use it for an WAP, not as a server." which was the correct decision.
Re: The canonical best household router is (Score:5, Insightful)
If you use a PC as a router though you can do far more with that spare power though, It can also be your DNS server, your home VPN server, SSH, server, Radius server, firewall, tor access point, FTP server, OpenID Server, ...
That extra power gives a lot of flexibility.