Holy Tomato! Using Tomato on my Linksys Router

Ever since Shaw (and other Canadian ISP’s) decided to charge its customers crazy amounts for bandwidth overages, I’ve been conscious of how much I download per month. As I watch a lot of Youtube and listen to a lot of internet radio, 100 gigabytes gets chewed up quickly, and even though Shaw has a tool for looking at bandwidth usage, it runs 48 hours behind, which makes squeezing out the last bits of the monthly bandwidth a lot harder.

To address this issue, I’ve started using the third-party Tomato firmware on my Linksys router. This has given my router a lot more added flexibility, with built-in QoS and bandwidth monitoring, as well as a slicker interface for port-forwarding (which is handy for when I want to throw a quick FTP server up).

The Tomato folks make no guarantee that their stuff won’t brick your router, but my personal experience thus far is that it is incredibly simple to install and configure, the documentation is well thought out (a rarity for open-source), and it has lived up to its hype as an alternative firmware.