You ARE using a 9 year old router, considering that probably all other hardware (PC, Laptop, Consoles, Phones, Tablets, ...) was replaced since then and most cable connections can't be maxed out with that wifi speed (After forward error correction you'll end up with about 30 mbit/s), a lot of things might be happier if you switched that one out :)
Which modern router do you propose? I am currently running Tomato, it's a great balance of ease-of-use and customizability. I'm not interested in having to do everything on the command line on the router as well, so if a modern router can run some great version of Tomato, it would be fantastic.
I would personally always try to get another AVM FRITZBox product [0]
I've used it for years and their continuous firmware development coupled with the DECT+VOIP abilities and solid hardware makes them a joy to use. Sadly, this is almost exclusively marketed towards the German market, hence my previous exposure.
Now that I live in the US, I'd assume that I'll probably have to take a look at ebay sellers or buy one on my next visit.
I used to run OpenWRT beforehand, but even after lots of configuring, I basically just ended up at a place that this system gives me out of the box. If I really wanted to, I could enable telnet and install the cyanogenmod-like "Freetz" OS on the machine [1]
"Members of the OpenWrt team have been in contact with Linksys for a while, discussing collaboration on device support in OpenWrt.
There had been no technical collaboration on device support until Belkin engineers posted a few incomplete patches in early April. These patches are currently being cleaned up, as they do not meet our quality standards.
The most important part that is still missing is a usable driver for the Marvell 802.11ac wireless chipset. Belkin is working on fixing this, but they have not given us an estimation on when such a driver will be provided.
The default firmware for this device seems to be using a proprietary driver provided by Marvell, which uses non-standard APIs for configuration. We don't know if Marvell will open source this driver, or will work on an alternative Linux driver. We believe that both approaches require a considerable amount of effort and time."
I've had extraordinarily good luck with the apple AirPort Extreme. Handles wifi n traffic and is rock solid. I can regularly play twitch games over it or stream 1080 p without issue.
I went from dd-wrt on a WRT54G to a TP-LINK TL-WR841NR with OpenWRT and it feels almost exactly the same. I even setup my network with the exact same SSID and password and my devices acted like nothing changed.
I'm actually running two access points right now. One of things I've valued the WRT54G on has been it's stability, where my AC router tends to crap all over itself depending on how demanding the active video streams are. Additionally, I barely get 15mbit down from Comcast currently.
