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| reply to chgo_man99
Re: I liked the quality said by chgo_man99:good advice, but there is one problem with your advice. DD-WRT or Tomato are open source, are often buggy, even "official" versions and no matter what appropriate model of router you use, it may bring it to instability like dropped connections or wireless signals. There are a lot of people using Tomato or DD-WRT without any problems. But, there are occasional reports of people who have the kind of problems you describe. I don't know all the causes, but the one I saw most was people who have a lot of connections open. Like torrents. They just had to fine tune their router configuration.
But, you're right that using custom and free tools with more features isn't free. Occasionally a new release is buggy. There's always the risk of "bricking" the router.
said by chgo_man99:Even if you restore the original firmware it may still not work as great as before. I've never heard anyone experiencing that (except for bricking their router). Flashing removes the firmware that existed. There's nothing left to execute. It's possible memory areas used to store configuration values could be uninitialized. Those random values could cause the new firmware to operate unexpectedly. But, just use the factory reset to force stored values to what they should be.
said by chgo_man99:Most Linksys home routers have some QoS. Its better than using DD-WRT. I disagree with that. Unless the QoS in Linksys routers has drastically improved in the last 2 years, it isn't suitable to prioritize different traffic originating from one (or more) computers.
What I recall with Linksys's QoS is that you can give priority to a specific attached device. That would be useful for an always-on, whole-house ATA phone service. It may have also had some L7 filters for gaming. But, nothing for SIP. And, especially nothing for RTP (the protocol carrying 99% of the call's traffic).
If anyone wants to try their factory QoS for something like Google Voice, I suggest they test it using the speedtest.net procedure I described earlier in this thread.
(BTW: I'm not defending DD-WRT. I'm not a big fan of it. I found Tomato to be easier to use, and its QoS worked much better. But, the downside is that Tomato doesn't support many newer routers.). |
