Posted: Sun Jun 24, 2012 17:21 Post subject: Why use DD-WRT
I've just been thinking about it. But what does DD-WRT have that Cisco's firmware doesn't?? And I'm not talking about worthless features or something you'll never use. I'm talking about the features that matter.
Cisco is stable and all the advertised features work in all builds of their firmware
What about DD-WRT? _________________
i believe the original goal was to create a better and more stable firmware for routers than the stock offerings. the key to it;s value is to support cheap consumer level router devices and give them features on par or better than business level routers. so your 50$ router could have features like vpn, vlan and many others that you could only get in devices from the big vendors for thousands of dollars or more-i am talking about cisco routers you needed to program from a commandline and take certification classes for that cost nearly as much as the device.
back in the mid 2000's, it was great to find it worked with my Linksys WRT54G routers because they were flaky to unusable. it turns out that there was nothing wrong with the hardware-the Linksys firmware was just poorly written and seems to still be to this day.
I see today that the things you can do with dd-wrt and routers in general are far advanced. to be able to use it as a server and media center with other addons is pretty impressive.
as far as your original question as whether DD-WRT is better than the stock firmware, that;s going to depend on the router and what the vendor offers. Go with the one that is stable and gives you the features you need. if the stock firmware does it all well, why change it?