The WRT54GL: A 54Mbps Router From 2005 Still Makes Millions For Linksys

Jon Brodkin, reporting for Ars Technica:In a time when consumers routinely replace gadgets with new models after just two or three years, some products stand out for being built to last. Witness the Linksys WRT54GL, the famous wireless router that came out in 2005 and is still for sale. At first glance, there seems to be little reason to buy the WRT54GL in the year 2016. It uses the 802.11g Wi-Fi standard, which has been surpassed by 802.11n and 802.11ac. It delivers data over the crowded 2.4GHz frequency band and is limited to speeds of 54Mbps. You can buy a new router -- for less money -- and get the benefit of modern standards, expansion into the 5GHz band, and data rates more than 20 times higher. Despite all that, people still buy the WRT54GL in large enough numbers that Linksys continues to earn millions of dollars per year selling an 11-year-old product without ever changing its specs or design.

Comments

Re:Damn Shame

[sexconker]

Linksys did "fix" the WRT54G many, many times.

Have a look at all the asinine models and hardware revisions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

The WRT54GL came about years later because people got pissed when they bought a WRT54G that wasn't the same as the other WRT54G routers on the market. Linksys crippled the memory and RAM and switched to a different OS, which made it impossible to use DD-WRT. The WRT54GL was a re-release of an earlier WRT54G revision - the one people wanted - with a $5 or $10 price increase.

If you got stuck with some other flavor of the router you had to hope it was compatible with DD-WRT, figure out if you could use the full version or the micro version, figure out if you could kill off the built-in VxShit OS, learn the ridiculously convoluted reset procedure to allow flashing, etc.

Don't buy these--they WERE wonderful

[Lothsahn]

As someone who's done (minor) work on Tomato, I'd highly recommend a ASUS RT-N66U (cheaper) or RT-AC68U (nicer) instead.

At the time, the WRT54G(L) was a great router. I've still got two of them on the desk next to me. Don't buy them now.

1. 1) Range: They don't have the range of more modern hardware like the ASUS routers I listed above
2. 2) Dual-Band: They don't have 5GHZ, which is much faster and has less interference from Neighbors
3. 3) Dropped Packets: The WRT54G has random dropped packet issues. Occasionally, it'll drop a wireless packet regardless of signal strength. With the RT-N66U, the packet loss went to 0%, over an entire night.
4. 4) Stability: The WRT54G is very stable. That said, typically it locked up once every 6-12 months. I've yet to have a lockup on a configured RT-N66U or RT-AC68U running Tomato (shibby), with over 8 deployed for a number of years.
5. 5) Speed: The WRT54G maxed out ~20Mbit (wired) and 6-12Mbit (wireless) running Tomato. The RT-N66U does around 50/225Mbit wireless/wired and the RT-AC68U pushes 400/900.
6. 6) Storage/CPU: The CPU is a 15 year old design, and the storage is 4MB of flash. Modern open routers run CPUs that are massively faster and have 128+ MB flash.

They were wonderful routers, but it's time. Unless you're just doing it for the nostalgia, do yourself a favor and get something that uses the improvements that have been made in the last 14 years.