Buying Guide

Home Wi-Fi Router Buying Guide (and When to Flash Custom Firmware)

This site published a best wireless routers list in 2008 and a guide to flashing DD-WRT onto a Linksys router, back when doing so was the only way to get decent features. Routers have changed more than laptops since. Here is what matters now.

Which Wi-Fi standard to buy

The standard on the box is a ceiling, not a promise. Your laptop's wireless card, the walls between it and the router, and your internet plan set the real speed. A Wi-Fi 6 laptop on a Wi-Fi 7 router gets Wi-Fi 6 speeds. Buy the router for the devices you own and the plan you pay for, not for the largest number.

One router or a mesh

A single good router placed centrally and off the floor covers a flat or a small house. Signs you need more than one access point: a room where video calls stutter, a garden office, or a house with thick masonry walls or three floors. A mesh kit of two or three nodes solves this with one network name and automatic hand-off as you move. If the house has Ethernet cabling, wired backhaul between nodes is far better than wireless backhaul, and a pair of ordinary access points on a wired network is the most reliable setup of all. Powerline adapters are a last resort; range extenders that halve the speed are worse than a second node.

Settings to change on day one

1. Change the admin password from the default, and the Wi-Fi password too if the router came with one printed on a sticker.
2. Set security to WPA3 (or WPA2/WPA3 mixed if you have older devices). Never leave WEP or open networks enabled.
3. Turn on automatic firmware updates. Unpatched routers are how home networks get compromised.
4. Create a separate guest network for visitors and smart-home devices so they cannot see your laptops.
5. Turn off WPS (the push-button pairing) and remote administration unless you need them.
6. Place the router high, central and away from the TV, microwave and fish tank. Placement beats almost any setting.

What became of DD-WRT and custom firmware

In 2008 a stock consumer router had almost no features, and flashing DD-WRT or Tomato onto a Linksys WRT54G added bandwidth monitoring, a proper firewall, guest networks and more, at the risk of bricking the device. Two things have changed. First, ordinary routers now include most of those features. Second, the community firmware effort largely moved to OpenWrt, which supports a wide range of current hardware and receives regular security updates, sometimes long after the manufacturer stops. Flashing is still worth it for two groups: people who want to keep a capable but abandoned router patched, and people who want features such as ad blocking, VPN routing or detailed traffic control at the network level. For everyone else, a current mainstream router with automatic updates is the safer choice.

The old Linksys advice, updated

If you still own a WRT54G or similar, it belongs in a museum rather than on your network: it supports only Wi-Fi 4 and its last security updates predate most of the devices in your house. The equivalent of that 2008 project today is buying a router with good OpenWrt support, flashing it with the current stable release, and enjoying a network that keeps getting updates for years.