Fixing the Anker Dual-Band N600 Router / Access Point

So Anker, my favorite battery / charger for cell phones company, ever so briefly released a concurrent dual band wireless router / access point. It worked - ish, but in my experience was hampered by a ridiculous 7-15ms overhead on everything that it did - so when your ping to xyz site was normally, say, 40ms, hard wired, it would be like 55ms instead of 42ms. File transfer speeds were fine for internet browsing, but significantly less than DD-WRT doesn't appear to have a match and was disparagingly put off saying that it was a rebadged router, they don't know what it is, and don't care.

On a side note, I'm a little disappointed with the DD-WRT folk, it seems like it's time to get out of Beta and into a new actual version, but that's an aside. On another side note, the openwrt x86 implementation leaves a little to be desired - in as much as I can't boot to it on a board that will otherwise boot every Linux implementation under the sun.

So - back to the original point of this - I've been fed up with my Buffalo router, which somewhere between its age, the WDS to its counterpart upstairs, and who knows what else, has been needing a reboot every two days or so. It's also not on the 5Ghz band, which a quick look around the block says is currently not in use. So I brought the device out of storage and looked around to see if we could find a match based on its mac address - and sure enough C8:3A:35 comes back as Tenda - and a little digging around the website (http://www.tenda.cn/tendacn/Product/show.aspx?productid=388) gave me the unbadged version of it - the "N6 Wireless N600 Concurrent Dual-band Router" - I was able to successfully use the "US_N6_BCM_ V2.0.4.1_EN" version of the firmware. Ping times are now normal, and the speed has been given a big jump - oddly better at sending than receiving - sitting right next to it, I'm able to max out its 100Mbit LAN interface when I'm receiving a file on my laptop (i.e. when the device is sending) - but when I'm sending a file through it (i.e. device is receiving) I'm only able to muster around 50Mbit real-world. The actual administration page hasn't been improved, so there it is, but at least it's now a nicer orange-yellow color. All told a very worthwhile upgrade!

So our question is - is it the new version (jumped from 2.0.1.3) that did the trick, or was there something in the badging of the firmware for Anker that screwed up the performance?

Since I'm just using this as an access point, can't really test what its routing capabilities are, but hopefully better than they were :-)