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Comment by sliverstorm | Hacker News Reader

The WRT54GL was a great router for its day, but Linksys has not really been making great consumer hardware for a couple years now.

I decided to jump ship for ASUS, and I've been pretty happy so far.

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I did the same thing. my Asus + tomato firmware = sanity. I couldn't believe how easy it was I've had the thing for about 4 years and never have to reboot it or anything.

New Asus routers like the N66U used TomatoUSB as a base, creating their own custom version of it. Then there are custom versions of Asus's firmware, such as the AsusWRT Merlin builds.

>New Asus routers like the N66U

Tangential questions: why do consumer routers never have six or eight ethernet ports? Most appear to have space, yet so few include extras.

Probably because hardly anyone uses all four ports, and extra ports is extra cost. Besides, you can always get a switch.

Not saying I would object to more ports, just my guess as to why.

Offering models with extra ports sounds like it would be an awesome way to price segment your customers.

The enterprise people have already figured this out, I don't know why the consumer people haven't.

I suspect that the Ethernet switch is not part of the SoC, so it's a separate component that is already price-segmented. A consumer wireless router with 8+ Ethernet ports would probably not have significantly better margins than the existing models, but might need another round of FCC certification, and might also cannibalize sales of enterprise routers.

Also, I think most consumers who have a need for more than 4 computers to connect to their router via Ethernet probably don't want their entire network to have such an expensive single point of failure. I've had Ethernet ports on wireless routers die before. I like my switch separate from my router/AP separate from my modem.

i swore by WRT54GL w/sd card mod for many many years (on dd-wrt, then tomato). jumped ship to an Asus RT-N16 recently cause i needed the wireless-N and gigabit switch. currently sporting the Toastman mod of tomato, Shibby mod is also good choice.

Toastman: http://www.4shared.com/dir/v1BuINP3/Toastman_Builds.html#dir...

Shibby: http://tomato.groov.pl/download/

I'm running the latest Toastman on an Asus RT-N66U. Great firmware and awesome hardware.

I agree with you, the latest products were quite limited. My brother bought one of their ADSL routers: the wireless range was limited (a lot less than my draytek and i think less than the old dlink we had), some features were crippled (usb port cannot be used for printer sharing but only for disk sharing, the disk should be fat and not ntfs, the sharing feature was basic) and wifi was continuosly freezing also with latest firmware 'til we searched on google and find some wifi parameter tuning hints on a forum

Yeah, these days Asus makes great routers while Linksys has languished.

Asus is increasingly my go to company as they make great routers (and other gear too) and are very open to the open source community.

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