Boost Your Wireless Signal of Router with DD-WRT Firmware

Did you ever have a question in your mind that you can make your router faster than what the make company has provided you? Ever thought you can improve transmission range than specified by your manufacturer of router? Its proved in Android mobiles that custom ROM from third party developers may give you better results than specified by your phone manufacturer and its purely depends.

With a firmware makeover in your router, you can boost your wireless signal and get various other features along with that. The important is you can prioritize the programs which provide the precious bandwidth. The firmware by DD-WRT is an open source firmware for routers. Today in the due course of article we would be going through the procedure on how to upgrade your router’s firmware to the powerful open source DD-WRT firmware.

DD-WRT Firmware for Router

DD-WRT is the free third party firmware for several wireless routers. It would generally replace the firmware that ships pre-installed on many of the routers. The DD-WRT firmware provides additional features which are not included the manufacturer’s original router firmwares.

Pre Upgrade Instructions:

• There is nothing much in particular I can go with the firmware upgrade of all the router manufactures like I have D-link router, you would be having Linksys and other Belkin. So it’s important that you follow the procedure correctly by seeing the guide mentioned by DD-WRT.
• DD-WRT have clearly mentioned that the DD-WRT installation works only for routers which supports flash memory storage and the memory shouldn’t be less than 4 MB (for Broadcom routers its 2 MB). Now that would filter out most of the router as the recent generation router only comes with flash memory.
• If you go wrong during the firmware upgrade then you will brick your router.
• Verify that you have selected the correct firmware upgrade tutorial otherwise it would brick your router.
• Also you should remember the IP for admin access to your router with login credentials.
• Firmware for a particular device may have its own pros and cons, this are listed in the ‘upgrade tutorial’.

How to Upgrade Firmware with Steps

You have come to this section looking for the firmware upgrade procedure but there is no specific and straight procedure for the installation for all the devices. DD-WRT supports various devices from various manufacturers and there firmware upgrade to DD-WRT for your router model varies. The download pack for firmware itself varies.

You need to visit DD-WRT list of support devices, search for your devices and if it’s supported then proceed with the DD-WRT installation notes for your devices or else stop looking further as there would no other procedure do that.

The DD-WRT notes provides the full tutorial of installing the DD-WRT firmware on your router and thus remove the manufacturer firmware.

Also, it’s important that before you proceed with the DD-WRT installation you need out all the content lessons provided in the supported devices page because there are various other limitations (you never know your router is not supported).

Boosting Signals of Routers

Most of the router has omni directional antennas and so they have a limited ranged of wireless transmission. If you could make your router go bi-directional then it would have a large range of transmissions. Also once you have upgraded to the DD-WRT firmware on your router, you would be able to get the advanced settings. In the advanced setting you would be able to spot the entry named as Xmit Power. This Xmit Power is set to 28 mW by default but it can be set up to 251 mW. But on a safer side you set it to 70 mW.

By installing this firmware you would be able to prioritize the bandwidth with proper management to boost signals. With this interactive traffic like telephony, browsing and telnet gets priority and bulk traffic like file transfer and P2P gets low priority. The objective of this bandwidth management is to allow both types without any unimportant traffic distribution.

The firmware upgrade once you install the DD-WRT on your router are available at and the help index page for any help tutorial.


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