Tomato Firmware: Best for WRT54GL Router By far, the best firmware I have tried.

Tomato is based on Linksys' source code, but it is heavily modified, optimized, and equipped with a completely new sleek web interface. That interface is worth a praise: it's easy to use, simple to understand, and very responsive because of that cool thing called AJAX (no need to refresh the whole page to see the changes).

Tomato has something other firmwares don't - a bandwidth monitor which can draw neat looking charts. I was afraid at first that it would require a lot of CPU power, but it actually seems that Tomato uses even less CPU than other software! The bandwidth monitor can show internet usage real-time, or even log it to router's memory.

As for QoS, it has the most options I've seen in my WRT54GL firmware testing marathon. There's 10 bandwidth classes (not just your usual High/Low), ability to assign a priority to all unclassified traffic, layer 7 and ipp2p filters, and even an option to classify the connection depending on how much data it transfers. For example, you can give High priority to WWW transfers under 512 kb (regular web browsing) and Low priority to WWW transfers over 512 kb (downloading files from sites, loading huge pictures, etc).

Of course, my only concern was if it actually worked, so I did the usual Azureus + Counter Strike test. Even when I was running Azureus, I noticed almost no ping increase in CSS, and my web pages were lightning fast, as if there were no p2p application running in the background. Note, I had to add Counter Strike to QoS rules myself, but even with default rule set, web pages were already prioritized and working perfectly, while my p2p traffic got the lowest priority - just like it should be!

I highly recommend Tomato to any WRT54G router users, especially those who need a good QoS or bandwidth monitor. It is, in my opinion, the very best firmware for wrt54gl routers.