We all have last year’s model routers lying around our house collecting dust. With the help of crafty open source developers, you can now bring these older devices to their full potential.

If you have a linksys or compatible broadband/wireless router, there are several free open source firmware upgrades you can use to make your router do some very advanced and neat things.

The most talked-about of the third party firmware upgrades for broadband routers is a program called Tomato. Download it here

There are other open source tools, such as Free WRT, but Tomato does the job well, and the installation process is quite simple.

How to upgrade using Tomato Formware:
1. Go to the Tomato website and download the firmware file
2. Unzip the downloaded file
3. Plug in your old router and go to your router’s firmware upgrade page. (If you don’t know how ot do this, perhaps this project isn’t right for you :)
4. Read the simple instructions that comes with the Tomato Router download to determine which installation file is compatible with your specific model.
5. Choose that file as described in step 4 and off you go. It may take up to 5 minutes to upgrade the firmware.

What Does the router firmware upgrade do for me?
There are a bunch of nice utilities included in Tomato that don’t come with the default software from Linksys. For example, bandwidth monitoring, QoS settings, Enhanced access restrictions, tools to help increase your P2P connections (good for Bit Torrent and the like) and some new wireless features like WDS.

Additional third party firmware upgrade sources:

http://www.freewrt.org/

http://www.openwrt.org/ (and the easier to install http://x-wrt.org/)

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