Four-Eight-Four [dot org]

Well, last week I ordered a new wireless router. Normally, I wouldn’t comment on a minor technological thing like this, but this one is “the bomb, yo.” It’s a Linksys WRT54G, and it’s very, very nice. The main reason I bought it is because I wanted one that worked better with my VOIP phone service … specifically, one that offered QoS (Quality of Service) settings. QoS allows you to specify priorities for different services, devices, etc., so that important stuff (like VOIP) gets most of the bandwidth. Previously, I had problems with VOIP quality dropping drastically if I was uploading files, etc.

So, I ordered my shiny new router from Amazon (where they are currently somewhere in the neighborhood of $55), and it arrived yesterday. I set it up, gave the ethernet ports that the VOIP devices were plugged in to top priority, and immediately noticed a significant difference.

I suppose for most people the story would end there, but I’m not your average person. I wasn’t content to just leave things the way they were … I wanted to learn more about how the thing worked, and what some of the settings did, and suddenly I discovered that there are folks out there that make replacement firmware for the device.

I downloaded DD_WRT (http://www.dd-wrt.com/), which purported to offer better QoS settings, and among other things, the ability to boost your signal strength.

It’s important to note here that my previous wireless router, a Microsoft model that I got for $10 (new in the box) from a friend who picked it up at a surplus sale after MS quit making them, had a pretty lousy range. My office is at one end of the house. The living room is at the other end. The cable modem/router is in the office. If I sat down in the living, I couldn’t get a signal with the MS router. So, I made myself a homemade parabolic reflector, which allowed me to get a signal on the close end of the living room. Not much of an improvement, but I could sit in my recliner and use my laptop.

Of course, my laptop is part of the problem … it’s an Apple Powerbook 667 (the Titanium model). They get horrendously bad reception on wireless networks … I think as a result of the metal body. Previously, I had an iBook (plastic body), and it had much, much, much better reception.

Anyway … the Linksys router gives me (in its stock form) a 70% signal on the front porch. So, boosting the signal wasn’t a big deal, but being the geek I am, I was interested in seeing how much range I could get.

So, I download the firmware and install it. The installation was a breeze … you just use the builtin firmware upgade option on the router, and it rebooted immediately with the new stuff running. The new QoS settings page is much more advanced. The Linksys firmware gives you two options for each device, port, or service … ‘High’ or ‘Low’. That’s it. DD-WRT gives you four: ‘Premium’, ‘Express’, ‘Standard’, and ‘Bulk’. Premium gives you more priority than the Linksys’ ‘High’; ‘Express’ and ‘Standard’ seem to be about the same as ‘High’ and ‘Low’ on the Linksys firmware. ‘Bulk’ means the device/port/service only gets bandwidth when nothing else is using a significant chunk of it.

Once I told the new firmware how much upstream and downstream bandwidth I should have, and set the two ports for the VOIP devices to ‘premium’, I ended up with SIGNIFICANTLY better quality. With the stock Linksys firmware, calls were clear … but there was a 2-7 second lag time between my speaking and the person on the other end hearing me, depending on what I was doing otherwise. I tested this by FTPing a file while talking to my wife on our landline. With the new DD-WRT firmware, the lag time is down to less than a second or so (comparable to me calling the landline on my cell phone, though still noticeably longer). I can now FTP up files with no noticeable difference in call quality.

Disclaimer: To a certain extent, call quality on a VOIP device is also dependent on the quality of your internet connection. If you have flaky DSL or whatever, your mileage may vary. For the sake of comparison, we have Charter’s top-tier cable modem service (3 Mbps up, 256 kbps down), and tests have consistenlty shown that I get pretty much what is advertised. Generally, I get around ~2.8 Mbps down, and ~220 kbps up.

OK, on to the signal strength. I was able to boost my signal from the default 28 mW all the way up to 251 mW … nearly a 10x increase. Once I did that, I was able to walk all the way out to the road and still get ~90% signal strength. Very, very nice. I haven’t tested my range yet, but I suspect I could get a usable signal even at around 700 feet from the access point.

I did go ahead and bump the signal strenght back down to around 170 mW … it is possible to burn out the chipset by keeping the strength too high, since it increases the amount of heat that it produces.

The DD-WRT firmware offers many more features than what I’ve mentioned here. Two notable features it adds are a cron deamon and an SSH daemon. I don’t know what I’m going to use the cron daemon for, but I’ll come up with something, I’m sure. I’ve already SSHed into the router and poked around. I don’t know what all you can do just yet, but it’s fun in a purely geeky sense …

So, in summary, I’m very, very happy with both the WRT54G, and DD-WRT. Both are top notch.