No, I don’t mean tomatoes, the vegetable-fruit thing that almost everybody eats on their sandwiches. I don’t like those things, and I never have. I’m still certain that they really are poisonous.
But … Tomato, the aftermarket firmware for Linksys and Buffalo routers, rocks. Just this past weekend, I replaced the previous firmware I had been using, DD-WRT with Tomato.
Man, what a difference. Prior to that, I had been more or less upset with CommieCast for the entire time we’ve been in Chattanooga over the sorry cable modem service I’d been getting. Turns out the big problem was the firmware, or so it appears.
Why do I say that? Well, my best effort download speed before Tomato was somewhere in the 3 Mbps range. Once I rid the router of DD-WRT, I suddenly started seeing those SpeedBoost speeds they’ve been exuberantly advertising on TV for the last few months. I’ve even seen downstream speeds as high as 15 MBps in the last few days.
If that wasn’t enough, Tomato is significantly faster too!
And, it’s got these nifty real-time bandwidth usage graphs too! Peep this:
Now, that’s what I’m talking about. I don’t have a good use for it yet, but boy is it geeky!
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I noticed a significant improvement in response time and quite a reduction in the router’s CPU load after switching from DD-WRT to Tomato, which is why I recommended it. Though I didn’t expect your gains to be quite as good as they were so I can’t quite bust out the ‘Told You So!’ even though I would like to.