TP-LINK TL-WDR3600 N600 Wireless N Dual Band Gigabit Router w/ 2x USB Ports $39 after $30 rebate + Free Shipping

What kind of bandwidth do you have from your ISP? I've had pretty good luck (not 100% CPU) on a similar class router (WHR-HP-G54) and Tomato, but that's with QoS on only 768k upload.

If it were *me* and I wanted to keep latency low for gaming, etc, I'd probably grab a Netgear WNDR3800 and put CeroWRT on it. There's a couple awesome comments on this article (give special attention to the comments by mtaht):
http://lwn.net/Articles/496509/

...

I've had this router for about three months as well. but its just sitting idle on a shelf. It was very unstable for me. Very disappointing, as I had the WDR-1043 model prior to this and it was rock solid for about three years.

I'm back to running the 1043, with router resets about once a week.
the 3600 worked great for about two weeks, then almost daily resets, then unable to put out a wireless signal. I know, I should return it to Newegg, but they want to charge shipping and I am a bit lazy. I keep thinking I will try to install some other firmware, but haven't gotten around to it yet.
Too bad, cause it looks pretty cool and it had great speed and range when it worked.

What kind of bandwidth do you have from your ISP? I've had pretty good luck (not 100% CPU) on a similar class router (WHR-HP-G54) and Tomato, but that's with QoS on only 768k upload.

If it were *me* and I wanted to keep latency low for gaming, etc, I'd probably grab a Netgear WNDR3800 and put CeroWRT on it. There's a couple awesome comments on this article (give special attention to the comments by mtaht):
http://lwn.net/Articles/496509/



Also, if you can, run CAT5 to latency sensitive devices like an XBox (wherever you're gaming a lot). CeroWRT basically has bufferbloat fixed on its wired interfaces (on the WNDR3800 which is their reference device). Wireless will still take some significant work. Another quote from mtaht:


Its not clear to me yet that the drivers in these TP-Links (3600/4300) have the necessary driver support to do this new stuff (specifically, support for 'BQL', or Buffer Queue Length). Its a small patch that drivers need (just a couple lines of code). Even though it might not be supported now, I'm sure it will be relatively soon since the Atheros drivers are open source.

For now, I'll probably settle on a WNDR3800 for my router (despite the cost), and use these TP-Links as access points/bridges until its less bleeding edge to make CoDel work on them. That said, I'll for sure give it a try when my TL-WDR3600 comes-- maybe it won't be too difficult? We'll see.

Worst case (we can't get CoDel working), these do have significantly more CPU power/RAM (560 MHz/128MB) than our older routers so they should be able to push much more bandwidth through the QoS system.

Unfortunately CeroWRT doesn't work with the WDR3600 which is this deal...
Doing some reading makes me think CoDeL is the only way to maintain ~100ms pings while roommates might be watching movie or youtube.

Meaning I'll have my eye out for WNDR3700's or 3800's for BF/CyberM yes?

Careful as most wndr3700 sold now feature the vastly inferior V3 chipset. Go for a WNDR37AV as it's a 3700 with a guaranteed V1 or V2 chipset.

Unfortunately CeroWRT doesn't work with the WDR3600 which is this deal...
Doing some reading makes me think CoDeL is the only way to maintain ~100ms pings while roommates might be watching movie or youtube.

Meaning I'll have my eye out for WNDR3700's or 3800's for BF/CyberM yes?

If you are doing soft rate limiting (eg shaping), BQL is not required at the driver level.

Yeah, the WNDR3800 is what I'd recommend for CeroWRT. Haven't seen any BF deals on them yet.

In other new I just got QoS and CoDel set up in my OpenWRT Attitude Adjustment beta 2 VM. It was actually pretty easy- see the Quickstart Guide half way down this page:
http://wiki.openwrt.org/doc/uci/qos

I'll have my TL-WDR4300 on Wednesday and can give it a try. The one potential missing thing is BQL support in the network switch's driver, but it sounds like its not required:
http://www.bufferbloat.net/projects/codel/wiki



I'll report back here how it goes. I'm really optimistic at this point.

This is probably a pretty basic (dumb) question, but as a new proud owner of one of these, how would I go about using it as a wireless bridge? Have an IP phone from work that I'd like to plug into it, and use this to bridge wirelessly to router in a different room. Would this also be able to function as a repeater to extend signal? Other router is an older Airlink AR410W "super" G (which doesn't have any 3rd party firmware available, I checked...)

Do I need OpenWRT to do so, or can I use the WDS bridging in the stock firmware? OpenWRT seems like a pain in the neck to get installed... and that's coming from a former developer

I got this router and have loaded Openwrt on it. It is working fine thus far

I do this with DD-WRT on an Asus N-16.