firewall/router with traffic shaping and dial-up fallback?

I bought an Actiontec some time ago with the intention of using it as a
home firewall/router with traffic shaping and with fallback to dial-up
service in the case of a cable modem service outage.

At the time I figured that the Actiontec would soon be easily modified and
that I would have a fair amount of time to play with it (with a 4 kids and
a pretty hectic household this probably wasn't too realistic).  Due to the
heroic efforts of a number of members of this list, it looks like the
modifiability may be just around the corner, though I'm unclear as to
whether daughter-boards will be required for hacking, and whether they will
be available to those of us who must be careful not to pick up the wrong
end of a soldering iron.

Even with the ability to build new kernels and load new images, I'm not
clear on how straightforward it will be to implement the functionality I
desire.  It looks like I can get most of what I want (save for the dial-up
part) by plunking down around $80 for the Linksys WRT54g and installing
Sveasoft firmware.  Whether this makes sense depends on the likelihood that
the Actiontec can be hacked to do what I want, the complexity of that
hacking, and the extra expense associated with it (e.g. buying a
daughter-board/reflasher).

Comments?

Thanks,
Sam
__
ActionHack Mailing List - ActionHack-W7/[email protected]
http://www.express.org/mailman/listinfo/actionhack
http://www.embeddedlinuxinterfacing.com/wiki.php/ActiontecDualModem