WRT54GL And 50mb

[littleb2005]

will i still be able to get 50mb if i buy this router

before anyone ask the wireless it just there incase i need it am just wondering that if i connect to a wrt54gl with the wireless disable and connect via the lan port

will i still be able to get 50mb?

[Ignitionnet]

No.

EDIT: Actually to be more accurate, it depends. Maybe. Depends what application you use to try and get to 50Mbps. For multi-threaded downloads using a lot of connections the answer is no, for small numbers of threads you'll probably be ok.

[Dai]

Most opinion I see on the 'net suggests that this router WAN to LAN maxes out at about 27Mb with standard firmware.

Whether it's a firmware or hardware limit is anyone's guess.

[Ignitionnet]

Tomato will give more.

[BloodyL]

The standard wrt54gl firmware is rubbish, if you upgrade it to the latest tomato firmware you'll be able to use it just fine on 50mb, I can max out my connection easily with 10 connections to giganews.
It's actually quite the little workhorse.

[RainmakerRaw]

The WRT54GL is fine for 50 megs, provided that you (1) upgrade to Tomato firmware - and you'd be silly not to regardless, tbh; and (2) you rely mostly, or solely, on ethernet. The WAN > LAN throughput is fine, but of course the WRT54GL is a wireless G model and so the wifi side can't quite keep up.

Here's my trusty old WRT with the latest RAF Tomato (http://victek.is-a-geek.com/tomato.html) (which is Tomato firmware + speedmod + contrack and other tweaks) installed. As you can see, it's serving me at 6.34MB/sec without even breaking a sweat. That was a 15 thread Usenet download from Giganews btw. The RAF version of Tomato can handle well over 8,000 connections at a time without even blinking so your average Usenet or torrent download isn't going to make it sweat.

Download Failed (1)

There are a couple of extra settings you can tweak for more speed, consistency and reliability. For example, I made a point of turning down the length of time it takes to recycle TCP and UDP connections too, which helps:

http://www.rainmakerkennels.co.uk/images/tomato-raf-timeouts.png

I also set the CPU clock to 250MHz (from a factory default of 200MHz), which does make a noticeable difference with no extra heat output. The CPU on the WRT was actually designed to run at 250MHz at stock, but for some reason Linksys dialled it back. This two-second tweak gives you 25% more processing power at no loss! RAF Tomato allows you to do it with a single click. :) So as you can see, there's plenty of life in the old dog yet. They're nice routers and definitely a thousand times better than the awful DIR-615 handed out by VM. IIRC the 615 can only handle 30 connections at a time, and it takes forever to recycle them. No wonder it falls over so quickly! Browsing seems quicker with the WRT, too.

I'm actually thinking of building my own "future proof" router atm. I was going to buy an Asus RT-N16 (which is easily capable of ~500Mbps WAN>LAN) but for that price I can build a small form factor "PC" to act as a router, stateful firewall, download box and media server all at once. With two gigabit network cards, a wireless N card, Linux (ClearOS or maybe Debian) on a flash card and a low powered AMD 2x CPU and 2GB RAM, it'd be easily capable of routing 400Mbps as well as handling NAT, DHCP, downloading and media serving. I might even turn it into an FTP server if VM make good on their upload promises. :p Anyway, I digress.