*** Disclaimer: By flashing the firmware, your router could be bricked/killed and its warranty be voided. ***

I bought a Planex BLW-54PM home router some time ago. It does the job well and in my opinions good for its price.

However, the lack of some features, like the support of AES encryption in WPA-PSK mode, and little configurable tweaks here and there, drove me to explore around for 3rd party firmwares, which is more functional and configurable, that can be loaded on it.

The first to do was to determine what was actually inside. Since I wasn't ready to physically crack open my little router yet, I had to make it out by other methods.

How it started I’ve forgotten, but the first major indication was the finding of the string "SERCOMM" in the binary firmware, which means that the BLW-54PM is probably an OEM product of SerComm.

Then, by further research, comparing of specifications, photos, screenshots of the web admin interface and manuals, led me to believe that it's actually a SerComm IP806SM, which is probably the OEM of quite a few other little routers as well.

(BTW, you may find photos of the internals of some (presumably) the OEM of IP806SM at the FCC site)

So I strode over SerComm’s site, however, no publicly downloadable firmware for the IP806SM could be found.

But then, the first 3rd party firmware I would like to try was OpenWrt, which is based on Linux, largely open sourced and very configurable.

However, the BLW-54PM/IP806SM, which uses the Marvell (Libertas?) chipset, is not likely able to run OpenWrt because of 2 issues:

• The first issue is that the codes for the Marvell chipsets are close-sourced, and is not currently supported by OpenWrt.
• The second issue is that, the BLW-54PM probably has only 1MB flash, which is not enough to run a working OpenWrt install.

And that means other 3rd party *Wrt or similar firmwares probably won't run on it as well.

Thus, I continue to look for IP806SM firmwares, and at last found it here, through a forum post at broadbandreports.com. After much consideration, I took the risk and flashed the firmware by TFTP (the web interface wouldn’t take the firmware, saying it wasn’t fit blah blah blah… so I had to use TFTP… e.g. tftp -i 192.168.1.1 put c:\temp\*.img)... And now my BLW-54PM supports WPA2-PSK and AES encryption.

As a side note, as I would want to enhance keep the wireless signal straying away from my apartment, I bought a LevelOne WAN-1160 directional antenna.

However, the signal quality doesn't seem to improve much compared to the original antenna, and I'm now planning to buy a new one with higher gain (10dbi?) later.

Edit on 2008-09-17: Some time before I sold the WAN-1160 and bought a Planex ANT-IN-10P, the reception has improved and satisfactory for now.

More information:

A newsgroup post with links to a few photos of the internals of (presumably) the IP806SM