Problem with WRT54G v7 Router and Broadband Connection

We've been having issues with our router and/or shared broadband connection here at home for the past few days.  My first thought was that P2P downloading from two machines on our home network were eating up bandwidth and causing the browsing slowdown or connection failures on other machines.  A symptom of this would be the inability to connect to the web admin interface of the router.  In the past few days, many of us in my family who depend on web access to do our work, were frustrated and had a very difficult time in completing our jobs.

Since my wife urgently needed unhindered, continuous, and stable web access, I had to block all TCP/UDP ports above the list of well-known ports which are between 0 and 1023.  That includes most ephemereal ports.  I blocked TCP/UDP ports 1025 to 65535 on our Linksys WRT54G v7 wireless router which still had the default firmware of 7.00.0.  This allowed most of us who relied on the web to be able to continue with our work uninterrupted.

The problem was that my brother, who pays for our Internet connection, owned one of the machines that was doing the downloading.  I could not block ports 1025 to 65535 permanently.  Another reason why I felt that blocking the ports permanently was not a good solution, was that, at some point in the future, I was also going to be doing some P2P downloading.

I experimented with QOS settings and scheduling of the P2P port blocking.  The problem with the WRT54G is that you cannot schedule port blocking, either based on the day of the week or the hours of the day.  What happens if you try to schedule port blocking, is that for the other hours of the day or days of the week, Internet access is completely blocked.

Configuring QOS seemed to provide stability to the broadband connection; however, the WiFi connection became unstable.  Our laptops frequently had their WiFi connections disconnect, at which point, we would wait until the WiFi signal was detected again or we manually initiated the detection.  I had to find another solution.

I thought about converting my Storage PC into a router, a proxy server, or a DHCP server, hoping that I could transfer some of the functions and loads from the router to the Storage PC.  I also tried to investigate if I could replace the WRT54G v7 firmware with DD-WRT or OpenWRT but because of the Atheros chipset of the version 7 model of WRT54G, no other firmware was compatible other than the Linksys firmware. 

While searching for alternative firmware, I came across forum posts that showed problems with older firmware of the WRT54G v7 which were fixed by updating to a newer firmware.  I had kept the firmware of the router to its default of 7.00.0 because I wanted to wait for a firmware that had been fully tested and stable.  2 years ago, it seemed that new firmware would always come out after a couple of months to fix stability issues.

When I took a look at the latest firmware, 7.00.6, at Linksys' WRT54G download page for Asia-Pacific, it was dated April 11, 2007.  There were no later firmware released and this indicated to me that the firmware had been stable for over 2 years.  I had to give this firmware a try to see if it would solve our router problems.

I disconnected the router from our WAN connection by releasing the WAN IP leased from our ISP before I updated the firmware, to make sure that the router would remain stable during the update process.  After updating and testing, everything seems to be stable - WiFi connection, browsing the web, accessing the web admin interface, and P2P downloads.  No more problems.  So far, so good.