I live in a small one-story house where the wifi signal on one end barely reaches the other end. I’ve attempted to remedy this — unsuccessfully — by amplifying the wifi signal with two products:

1. The Linksys Wireless-G Range Expander. The verdict? It sucks. It doesn’t support WPA encryption (only the inferior WEP), configuration is convoluted (the auto-configuration button doesn’t always work), and the device needs to be close to the signal it’s expanding — partially defeating the point of an expander.

2. The Netgear Wireless-N Networking Kit. Unlike the Linksys Range Expander, configuring the Networking Kit is a breeze. My main beef with this device is that you need a wired connection to the bridge that connects wirelessly to its access point counterpart. (You can hook up a wireless router to the bridge, but that gets expensive and unnecessarily complex.) My secondary beef with this device is that the connection isn’t consistent. It drops. Want to stream music or transfer large files? You’re out of luck. At least I was when attempting to do either one. Third of all, at $179, it’s pricy.

Enter the Linksys WRT54GL router and DD-WRT. The router, on its own, is no different from any other B/G wifi router. But when you arm it with DD-WRT, you turn your $60 router into a $600 router.

DD-WRT, Tomato, OpenWrt, and other third-party firmware projects have been around for years. But the ability to connect wirelessly to a WRT54GL that’s being used as a repeater bridge (range expander) is new to DD-WRT as of late 2007.

I had a Linksys WRT54G router in the attic collecting dust. Earlier this week, I brushed the dust off the router, flashed it with DD-WRT mini and then DD-WRT standard (per the instuctions), and input the settings of the router whose range it’s supposed to extend. I also enabled WPA2 encryption and boosted the transmission signal, all through the user-friendly DD-WRT web interface. After an hour, I was able to connect to the Linksys WRT54G router wirelessly, which in turn was connecting to my Linksys WRT330N router wirelessly, which in turn was giving me an orgasm.

While the Netgear Wireless-N Networking Kit is theoretically over five times faster because of the draft-N standard it uses, the dropped connection I experienced with it alone makes it inferior to the WRT54G with DD-WRT. Also, I can’t move the access point significantly closer to the bridge for a stronger wireless connection in the Networking Kit because of the requirement that the computer has a wired connection to the bridge.

As of this writing, DD-WRT version 24 release candidate 5 is the only version of DD-WRT to support repeater bridge functionality. (Release candidate 6.2 “supports” the functionality but doesn’t work!) You can grab DD-WRT from the downloads page after checking to see if your router is supported (DD-WRT isn’t limited to the Linksys WRT54G/L routers) and reading the installation instructions.