I was in the area so I invited James, Drawde, and Alex for lunch. James was unavailable but Drawde and Alex were. And as luck would have it, Drawde treated us to lunch at Seven Corners no less. Thanks Drawde!
As happens often when we get together, talk turned towards gadgets and electronics. Soon we were on the way to gadget-wonderland CD-R King where Drawde and Alex got mobile battery packs. After that, Edward had to run off somewhere. Alex and I went to CompLink where we discussed how to upgrade my home networking infrastructure.
Previously, I had cobbled together a rag-tag bunch of devices providing different network services:
- Huawei D100 router with Huawei E1550 USB modem – for 3G Internet connection
- Tenda W311R+ – for Wireless-N
- CD-R King 5-port gigabit Ethernet switch
I eventually got rid of the Tenda because it was having connection problems which left me with:
- Huawei D100 router with Huawei E1550 USB modem – for 3G Internet connection and Wireless-G.
- CD-R King 5-port gigabit Ethernet switch
Unfortunately, it meant I had no more Wireless-N and I still had one too many devices for my network infra. Unsatisfactory.
Going through the available products, we saw the Buffalo AirStation Nfiniti High Power. It’s got both Wireless-N and gigabit Ethernet ports but no 3G USB modem support. However, Alex said since according to the packaging it has DD-WRT firmware available, I can probably enable 3G USB support. So I took it.
I got to work as soon as I got home. I found out that Buffalo had thoughtfully included a customized DD-WRT with the installation CD. I updated the firmware to that and found out that it doesn’t support a 3G USB modem. Hoping that a newer version would, I downloaded the latest customized DD-WRT from the Buffalo website. No luck either.
I tried looking for plain vanilla DD-WRT firmware at the DD-WRT router database but only found one for the WZR-HP-G300NH model which would have bricked my WZR-HP-G300NH2 model. It took a little bit more digging before I finally found the proper firmware. I updated the firmware to that and, voila, 3G USB modem support! A little more configuring and I got my dream one-device home network infrastructure. Thanks Alex!