ASUS WL-520gU Home Gateway Wireless Router

Issues, Aftermarket Firmware

Almost immediately, this router began to cause difficulties. Network slowdown was pronounced with only a dozen connections active, with a healthy bittorrent swarm bringing it to a screeching halt. Attempts to fix this with the inbuilt QoS were utterly useless, and further hampered by the need to completely reboot the router on even the most trivial of setting changes.
After multiple updates to the firmware with no appreciable improvement, I turned in desperation to aftermarket firmware. DD-WRT is one of several Linux-based router firmware packages designed to boost the performance of consumer gateway routers, and of those I found it had the best hardware support.

After installing the DD-WRT firmware–a process painstakingly detailed on their website, that should be followed exactly–I noticed an immediate improvement in performance. Setup was much quicker than with the factory firmware, and soon my network was humming along again with no complaints.

Conclusion

So, should you buy the WL-520gU for your home network? My answer is: it depends. If you want a box you can set up quickly and forget about, with no extra fiddling, my answer is a definite no. The factory firmware was a complete performance disaster, and while ASUS’ supplied updates smoothed things out somewhat, there were still serious hiccups whenever traffic exceeded that of light web surfing.

If, on the other hand, you are looking for a cheap router that you can customize to your heart’s content, and you don’t mind installing aftermarket firmware, this is one of the better cheap options out there. Linksys’ decision to downgrade the latest revisions of the WRT54G has rendered it unsuitable for modification, and many other vendors’ routers are similarly crippled.