When you setup a wireless bridge with Tomato, it’s best to use two identical routers of the same model number. I also recommend that you install the same firmware version on both routers. Ideally, you’ll get the best overall performance by using two dual band routers. Use one band for the wireless bridge. Use the other for your wireless clients.

When you setup a wireless bridge between two Tomato routers, bear in mind that Tomato doesn’t offer a “repeater bridge” mode. But it does have a mode called “Access Point + WDS”. This is similar to how the repeater bridge mode in DD-WRT operates. They both retransmit the broadcast and they both decrease throughput with each wireless hop.

Tomato offers a wireless bridge mode that allows you to connect to a host router much like any other wireless client. In ‘client mode’, the router does not retransmit wireless signal to other clients. Client mode is great when you want to put a group of computers on a different subnet, but those computers can be connected with an Ethernet cable.