Looking for a Cheap DD-WRT Modem / Router

By +Byt
in Smart Home, Network & Security

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Experienced

+Byt Subscriber¹

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Hey All,

Sadly i am moving back home to live with the parents, they have a standard ADSL Max package from BT and are using the BT Hub3.

I would like to replace that with a new modem / router which is dd-wrt compatible but i have no idea what is a decent router these days i am abit out of touch with it all :( I want something that is under ?100 if possible tbh,

Any suggestions welcome!

Cheers x

Grand Master

Detection

Posted
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I am enjoying my Linksys Cisco WRT160NL running the 2nd latest release of DD-WRT and it is 100% stable (hence I haven't upgraded to the latest release)

You can get them for well under ?100 on ebay

http://www.ebay.co.uk/sch/i.html?_trksid=p5197.m570.l1313&_nkw=WRT160NL&_sacat=0&_from=R40

Mentor

francescob

Posted
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A router+modem that is DD-WRT compatible? According to their hardware table that restricts the search to only one single model: Buffalo WBMR-HP-G300N (Lantiq AR9@333 + Atheros AR9280). If you want save a good amount of money the BT Home Hub V2B can run OpenWRT on it. The Asus DSL-N55U can't run dd-wrt or open-wrt but it's one of the best routers with modem you can find for that price, awesome hardware and rock solid firmware (much more reliable than previous Asus routers).

Experienced

+Byt Subscriber¹

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I am enjoying my Linksys Cisco WRT160NL running the 2nd latest release of DD-WRT and it is 100% stable (hence I haven't upgraded to the latest release)

You can get them for well under ?100 on ebay

http://www.ebay.co.u...cat=0&_from=R40

Hey Mate, is this the correct model? http://www.dabs.com/...WRT160NL&src=16

Cheers :) ill buy it for delivery Saturday if so :)

Grand Master

Detection

Posted
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Hey Mate, is this the correct model? http://www.dabs.com/...WRT160NL&src=16

Cheers :) ill buy it for delivery Saturday if so :)

Yep, that's the one :)

When you first flash DD-WRT to it, there are 2 firmwares, first flash is for Linksys > DD-WRT transition, 2nd one is the full DD-WRT firmware, and any updates after that only need the main firmware flashing

Mentor

francescob

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Hey Mate, is this the correct model? http://www.dabs.com/...WRT160NL&src=16

Cheers :) ill buy it for delivery Saturday if so :)

Maybe you should consider looking at some other models too, the WRT160NL is pretty old (it came out in 2009) and the range is quite mediocre even if you replace the antennas (source: I have bought basically every Linksys model since the WRT54G).

Grand Master

Detection

Posted
Posted

Maybe you should consider looking at some other models too, the WRT160NL is pretty old (it came out in 2009) and the range is quite mediocre even if you replace the antennas (source: I have bought basically every Linksys model since the WRT54G).

My wifi range is superb with the stock antennas, neighbours 2 doors away can connect easily, coverage all over my house

Just used DD-WRT to boost the range / power

Capture.PNG

Mentor

francescob

Posted
Posted

My wifi range is superb with the stock antennas, neighbours 2 doors away can connect easily, coverage all over my house

Just used DD-WRT to boost the range / power

A router range can be relative, the same router could cover your whole house but at the same time cover barely one room in somebody's else house, it depends on the walls, on the interference and on the country's regulations for transmit power. I had much, much better performance with other linksys models like the dual-band E3000 rather than with the WRT160NL that I found having a similar range to the older WRT160N or the WRT300N. Anyway there are websites that benchmark routers and while certainly better than the average the WRT160NL couldn't nearly match to some of the newer models (see here http://www.smallnetb...d-router-charts ). Also if you actually use the USB port having a 100mbit LAN and only a 400mhz CPU and 32mb of ram could greatly limit the samba performance when sharing drives. That Asus modem I linked has 128mb of RAM and two 600mhz+ CPUs and it literally flies (I had to glue it to the table) with samba.

Grand Master

Detection

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Posted

A router range can be relative, the same router could cover your whole house but at the same time cover barely one room in somebody's else house, it depends on the walls, on the interference and on the country's regulations for transmit power. I had much, much better performance with other linksys models like the dual-band E3000 rather than with the WRT160NL that I found having a similar range to the older WRT160N or the WRT300N. Anyway there are websites that benchmark routers and while certainly better than the average the WRT160NL couldn't nearly match to some of the newer models (see here http://www.smallnetb...d-router-charts ). Also if you actually use the USB port having a 100mbit LAN and only a 400mhz CPU and 32mb of ram could greatly limit the samba performance when sharing drives. That Asus modem I linked has 128mb of RAM and two 600mhz+ CPUs and it literally flies (I had to glue it to the table) with samba.

I have a Samba share set up via the USB port and I get the full 100mbps (10MB/s) read/write to the drive via LAN, burst speeds upto 15MB/s, I only have wireless G laptop so can't test if it can perform any faster atm

Of course there are going to be better routers, but OP wanted a router for under ?100 and some feedback from someone who owns one.

For a typical house full of devices, it manages extremely well, I have all 4 LAN ports wired to different devices, I have 5 wireless devices connected with around 3-4 connected at any one time and its fine

If you have experience with a better router at a similar price then by all means, advise away ;)

Grand Master

Detection

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Posted

I dont think that WRT160NL actually has ADSL build in, meaning i would need to user a separate modem to connect to the internet yea?

Yep, I have: Phoneline > Openreach Modem > WRT160NL > Devices

Not sure I've seen any DD-WRT ADSL Modem/Routers

Grand Master

Brandon H Supervisor

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as the person in post 4 pointed out, it looks like this is what you're gonna want http://www.amazon.co.uk/Buffalo-Wireless-N-Nfiniti-AirStations-Router/dp/B005584W2E/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1360880600&sr=8-1

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francescob

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Posted

I have a Samba share set up via the USB port and I get the full 100mbps (10MB/s) read/write to the drive via LAN, burst speeds upto 15MB/s, I only have wireless G laptop so can't test if it can perform any faster atm

USB2 can go much faster than that, I managed to get full speed only from 600mhz devices mostly because samba is very CPU intensive.

Of course there are going to be better routers, but OP wanted a router for under ?100 and some feedback from someone who owns one.

For a typical house full of devices, it manages extremely well, I have all 4 LAN ports wired to different devices, I have 5 wireless devices connected with around 3-4 connected at any one time and its fine

If you have experience with a better router at a similar price then by all means, advise away ;)

There are hundreds of routers that can run DD-WRT/OpenWRT very reliably nowadays so it's just a question on what you actually want from one, for example I bought a router for OpenWRT a couple weeks ago to use as 3g router, I paid it 25? (TP-Link 3420) yet it never freezed or had to be restarted (and the wifi range is actually decent). Some have lots of ram, some have fast CPUs, some have multiple USBs, some have 3 antennas or can go up to 1W of transmission power, there's as lot to choose from.

I dont think that WRT160NL actually has ADSL build in, meaning i would need to user a separate modem to connect to the internet yea?

As I previously wrote in my post there is literally one (1) modem+router that can run DD-WRT. The reason is that DSL drivers are proprietary and usually their source code is never released so DD-WRT and OpenWRT developers have a very hard time getting those to work. If you don't mind running OpenWRT instead you can find the BT Home Hub V2B (it has to be the B revision) with the modem, wifi 802.11n and USB: it's very cheap and very reliable.

Grand Master

Detection

Posted
Posted

USB2 can go much faster than that, I managed to get full speed only from 600mhz devices mostly because samba is very CPU intensive.

I formatted my Samba drive to EXT4 to get those speeds, with FAT32 and NTFS is was 2-6MB/s tops

Mentor

francescob

Posted
Posted

I formatted my Samba drive to EXT4 to get those speeds, with FAT32 and NTFS is was 2-6MB/s tops

I think it's just dd-wrt not being much performant on those filesystems due to using the kernel driver rather than ntfs-3g and still coming with a pretty old kernel (2.4?). With that CPU it should go twice that speed, maybe if you install ntfs-3g or openwrt it'll have better performance.

That Buffalo looks decent, im going to look for reviews now.

You can't follow the reviews if you're going to use a third party firmware, the behavior could be entirely different with another firmware. That router works well only with OpenWRT, forget using DD-WRT on it, when the official dd-wrt build for that router was compiled the lantiq support was very lacking and the wireless driver used for the atheros wifi wasn't in much better shape. OpenWRT supports several different lantiq platforms and routers (DD-WRT instead supports only that model) so you're very likely to have a much better experience on it.

Grand Master

Brandon H Supervisor

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You can't follow the reviews if you're going to use a third party firmware, the behavior could be entirely different with another firmware. That router works well only with OpenWRT, forget using DD-WRT on it, when the official dd-wrt build for that router was compiled the lantiq support was very lacking and the wireless driver used for the atheros wifi wasn't in much better shape. OpenWRT supports several different lantiq platforms and routers (DD-WRT instead supports only that model) so you're very likely to have a much better experience on it.

buffalo routers come with dd-wrt on them, so he can indeed follow reviews
Mentor

francescob

Posted
Posted

buffalo routers come with dd-wrt on them, so he can indeed follow reviews

Not all models do and the firmware is preinstalled only in some regions (USA only?), I still haven't seen one shipping with dd-wrt officially here. From the screenshots of the webui for that model it certainly doesn't come with dd-wrt nor the product page shows the dd-wrt logo for it.

Grand Master

Brandon H Supervisor

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Not all models do and the firmware is preinstalled only in some regions (USA only?)

ah, that explains that. I'm in the US and I'm pretty sure they all come with dd-wrt here. didn't realize it was different in other regions
Experienced

+Byt Subscriber¹

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Well maybe i got a good device? I put DD-WRT on it and the thing is working great so far, the only issues i heard of was the network ports on the device being abit flakey, but mine appear to be fine :)

Wireless is great, the signal now reaches a lot further than it did on stock firmware, most likely because i can increase the signal strength etc. For a cheap ADSL / Router, its not performing bad at all tbh.

I will update this thread if i get any problems though, i am not going to be biased because i paid for it.

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