Since this seems like the place with the highest signal to noise ratio to ask all manner of tech (and non-tech) questions, I thought I'd throw this out here.

I've got a house that's very wireless unfriendly. It's mostly 18 inch thick block walls, and it's big. 3500 square feet, and although there's a small central section that's two stories and normally shaped, there's a long narrow wing extending out from each side. Way too old to have anything like normal AC wiring, much less cat 5 or anything. Over the course of trying to get a usable wireless signal throughout the house, I eventually ended up with 3 Linksys WRT54G routers, because they were universally accepted as being the most customizable and were supported by the widest range of alternate firmwares. Plus, they were cheap. And, they had detachable antennas. I was able to replace the firmware and the antennas and jack up the power until I could get a working WDS setup using the one in the middle as the connection to the internet, and having the wings use WDS to connect to that.

That wasn't 100% reliable so I eventually bought a super long masonry bit and ran through a few walls and under some carpet that was being replaced to get a wired connection to one side of the house. Then, I got given this cool Netgear MOCA adapter that let me wire up the other wing. Now, the routers in each wings are just hooked to ethernet, acting as switches for the other wired devices in those wings and APs for the wireless devices that wander over there.

This has worked well, mostly, but it's starting to have some drawbacks. For starters, even though my laptop can't pick up an AP in the middle of the house from one of the wings, it can see 5 or 6 other networks in the neighborhood. I'm starting to get connection problems that might be interference/congestion related, and I'm thinking of getting off of the 2.4ghz band. 2.4ghz is also a problem, because we also rent out a couple of downstairs rooms to college students, and they seem to have microwaves used at all hours, which further causes problems. So, I'd like to think about the options of 5ghz and 802.11n. Plus, the possibilities of gigabit ethernet or a USB port for sharing might be nice, too.

So, I might be in the market for a new router or 3. Is there any router out there that's as universally well regarded as the WRT54g? I doubt that any new router is so magical that it could cover my whole house instead of the three router team I've got doing it now, but if there is such a router, that would be worth my looking into. Also, now that I have a hacky wired solution in place, I'm less likely to need to replace a router's firmware, but I still like knowing that's an option, especially if I want to segregate these students into a separate guest network or something. However, if there's a router out there that's good enough that it's firmware does whatever I might want to do well enough so as to not need replacement, I guess I don't strictly need it to be hackable.

Thanks in advance!