I had to swap out my good 'ol WRT54G when I upgraded my service from 8 to 40Mbps about two or three years ago, even with the stock Linksys firmware and almost everything turned off I was barely seeing half the available throughput. Getting a newer router allowed me to take full advantage of my connection.

I remember those 316/318 boxes - they were pretty slick kit when they were new (which I want to say was like early 2000s), but the WAN side is cramped relative to what most ISPs can deliver these days (but remember, (affordable) >10Mbit ISPs are a relatively new thing). If memory serves they will do their internal 5x100 or 8x100 or whatever all day without buckling, whereas a lot of cheaper consumer routers tend to fall off if you want all ports driven all at once (which is admittedly a kind of rare scenario, but if you're streaming video on your internal network and have multiple users on the web and so on, it isn't impossible).

133MHz wrote:

I had to swap out my good 'ol WRT54G when I upgraded my service from 8 to 40Mbps about two or three years ago, even with the stock Linksys firmware and almost everything turned off I was barely seeing half the available throughput. Getting a newer router allowed me to take full advantage of my connection.

Did you use WLAN or LAN? On my WRT54GL I can use my 32 Mbit connection to the fullest when on ethernet. As far as wireless goes the old 11g standard is quite limiting, which isn't the fault of the router itself or the firmware though...