Third Party Firmware

Introduction

In this section, you will be introduced to some of the third party firewalls. There are many ways to upgrade your home wireless routers such as replace the antennas of your wireless routers and adapters to improve the signal. However, sometime you may not need to spend money to buy those stuffs. One way to upgrade your wireless router is to upgrade the firewalls using a third-party firewall. Below are some of the third party firewall features.

• Stability under heavy load

• Strengthens the signal

• Setup a wireless client bridge and repeater bridge

• Realtime bandwidth monitors

• Advanced QoS

• Create VLAN

• Enable VPN Services

• Enhanced Security: WPA and WPA2, both versions for Enterprise, better customizable firewall, OpenVPN is enable, and so on.

Commonly used Third-Party Firewalls

There are many third-party firewalls available today. The three most widely used are DD-WRT, Tomato and OpenWRT.

DD-WRT

DD-WRT is an alternate firmware available for several Wi-Fi routers. There is a paid and free versions available. DD-WRT is suitable for a great variety of WLAN routers and embedded systems.

OpenWrt

OpenWrt primarily uses a command-line interface, but also features an optional web-based GUI interface.

TOMATO

Tomato is a free open source Linux-based firmware. The major emphasis of Tomato is on stability, speed and efficiency. Tomato includes several types of bandwidth usage charts, advanced QoS access restriction features, raised connection limits which enables P2P networking, and support for 125 High Speed Mode (marketed by Linksys as "SpeedBooster").

Third-party firmware