will a linksys wrt54g be good enough here?

eon

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I will be moving to a house that will be on charter 30Mbps with voip phone. House is 2 stories and over 2600 and pretty long because the 2nd floor only covers less than half of the 1st floor.
Wireless devices wont be doing much heavy lifting, just browsing the web and such.

So my question is will my old wrt54g work fine here or will I see a huge difference by getting one of those dual band gigabit routers as far as wifi signal range and bandwidth bottlenecking?

thanks
 
My WRT54GL maxed out at about ~35Mbps using the latest Tomato firmware. It should do fine. I upgraded to an Edgemax Lite as my edge device and just use the WRT54GL as an access point now.
 
I would not recommend a WRT54GL for either routing performance or wifi (ESPECIALLY not wifi) today. Especially for a somewhat larger multi-floor house like yours. And if you have a vxWorks 2MB model (non-GL post-v4-G) then the thing is absolutely useless IMO. If you have a 4MB model and run Tomato or whatever and don't mind the thing slowing down your net a bit, then I guess you could use it for routing and maybe for partial wifi coverage for devices that don't need a lot of bandwidth. 802.11g is pretty dated and slow.

I hope you're not thinking of doing extra stupid things like connecting desktops with wifi though.
 
The Linksys WRT54G has a general routing performance of 25-30Mbps give or take and also might be affected by third-party firmware vs default.

It should do you fine, although you're going to be pushing the max routing capacity of that little router to its max at your current broadband speeds and give up on anything faster. It'll do just fine based off your needs. Flashing the router (if not already done) with alternative firmware could help boost the coverage in the house without having to purchase an additional AP for optimal performance.

If you want to get into N territory or upgrade for a more future proof wireless router with strong hardware capabilities, then the Asus N66U is probably the "new" Linksys these days. Then again for the same price you can jump into a professional low-end router from Zyxel or MikroTik.
 
no im not going to have wireless desktops, atleast not the ones that matter (my own). I was already considering those top Asus routers before I realized I had this wrt54 router collecting dust but the price is killing me... never spent even half that price on a router before. Is there a router in the <$70 range that can give solid speed and signal range?
 
no im not going to have wireless desktops, atleast not the ones that matter (my own). I was already considering those top Asus routers before I realized I had this wrt54 router collecting dust but the price is killing me... never spent even half that price on a router before. Is there a router in the <$70 range that can give solid speed and signal range?


IMHO it isn't worth buying another wireless router in that price range unless you absolutely had to, especially if the current one you own can be flashed with better firmware.

At default the WRT54G will do you just fine, DD-WRT or Tomato will extend that routers capabilities a little further and give you a rock solid stable router. Just flash it and slap it on the network.
 
IMHO it isn't worth buying another wireless router in that price range unless you absolutely had to, especially if the current one you own can be flashed with better firmware.

At default the WRT54G will do you just fine, DD-WRT or Tomato will extend that routers capabilities a little further and give you a rock solid stable router. Just flash it and slap it on the network.

Depends. The 54G absolutely will not, with any firmware, cover the whole house with wifi. And 802.11g is really slow today (well, it always was really) especially with multiple devices (and Broadcom wireless gear especially sucks, or at least sucked back then - basically only Atheros and Intel didn't suck years ago, and as far as wifi cards go I'd still limit it to those two). Not sure what the OP's requirements for wifi are, but at least one AP/extender will be necessary to cover the house. And if any sort of decent speed is required from the wireless, he/she will need a new AP (or just get a new router with better wifi).
 
The WRT54GL will be a bottleneck, I'd suggest that you at least get a TL-WDR3600 or better router. It'll do fine for 100+ mbit and also has support for 3rd party firmwares.
//Danne
 
i tested it yesterday, my iphone 4 showed 2 bars when at the furthest point inside the house from the router.
My iphone also did a speedtest of 14Mbit down while PC did 24Mbit down wired into router. Since right now wireless will mostly be used for wife's laptop who just web browses this will be a sufficient stop gap for now especially after i install third party firmware.
 
Like you found out - it's good. It's not great, but it's not horrible either. I was using a couple of those for a while, then I got some great deals on Cisco E3000's (older, but good N routers) flashed to DD-WRT. They work 'good', too, but still in need of something better. The E3000 is way ahead of the WRT54GL, though.

For web browsing, you're good. For any data transfers over the LAN, definitely upgrade.
 
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