How powerful and fast is this thing?

how much traffic and how many clients are we talkin here? if you mean like 20-30 clients downloading FreeBSD DVD iso's then no, you need something professional, keep in mind this is a consumer home unit.

If you are talking about handling bittorrent traffic, this will do well.

Also, considering the processors that have been in some Platinum plated routers, like the Cisco 2621, which was basically a dual 10/100 port ethernet router, has a processor runs at 200mhz, the processing performance of the 3500L at 453mhz, and the 3700 (at 600mhz, I think) for that matter, are very impressive.

With 8 meg of flash, and 64 meg of ram, this should be able to handle most home and small business applications quite readily, and will even handle the crapstorm that bittorrent traffic creates.

-Dog

Uhm, yeah, it smokes the 54g for performance. 54g is 200mhz, and even with overclocking is pretty underpowered.

It's usually bittorrent connections that really pound on the ram of a router.

I too have a 54g, collecting dust now, and I know what you mean about performance.

However, I was able to use a 54g for quite a few years, without too many problems. Periodically the 54g's just seem to want to get rebooted, for no particular reason, even with stock firmware, and no torrents. About every two weeks, it seems like, to about a month in between.

Multiple versions of the 3500 are out. Make sure the one you get has 8meg of flash, for the most flexibility in working with the firmware here.

My personal opinion is that even though both boards use broadcom, the equipment I have gotten from Netgear is of consistently higher quality and reliability than Linksys/CiscoSys (home products/not enterprise obviously)

I haven't ended up with orphaned products on new operating systems with netgear either. Linksys still doesn't have drivers out for their WiFi G finder product that is still in vendors inventories.

I have ended up with a lot of broadcom in my products over the years, and it seems that the main problems are with vendors like HP that are supposed to be responsible for driver upgrades and instead orphan owners with functioning hardware, but no software to make it go wooshy. This refers to things like modem or network interfaces that are from broadcom that end up in PC's or laptops.

I don't see any issues with an open platform like this one, where we could really care less if the vendor EOL's it. We have all the info to fix any problems with software within the community, and that really is a great advantage for future support.

The stock firmware that comes from Netgear is actually pretty feature rich, and is currently the only firmware I see that is not "beta", although I expect that ddwrt and openwrt will evolve fairly quickly to release versions.

The choices you get with ddwrt are almost insane. Turn your router into an wired ethernet/wifi N bridge to hook your xbox over to your gateway router? Why not. Setup vlans with QOS and assign ports to different vlans? Sure. Use the internet uplink port as another switch port? Sure. Do it. The main advantage I see to the flexibilities in DDWRT are when these routers get a little older, and at some point in the future, I need to hack some wireless connectivity between here and here, or decide to make it into a NAS. With the flexible firmware, you can use magic software to take advantage of all the interfaces on this router have to offer.

I would like to see a version of the 3500 with A (5.4 Ghz) radio capabilities, but that is my only grudging criticism of this box.