Our company has tried both the Asus RT68-U and the Netgear N7000 (the two top of the line, AC1900 class, consumer routers on Small Network Builder[1]) for both office and factory operations with both stock and DD-WRT[2] firmwares.
Our initial preference was to lean towards the Asus given their track record on OpenWRT for the past few years. If your last experience with flashing a router’s firmware was with the Linksys WRT-54G back in 2004 than you may have missed out on all the Asus development that happened in the past decade.
We found the Netgear N7000 performed better overall. We were reluctant to use it as it did not support Dual-WAN mode initially like the Asus on stock firmware. (I.e. primary Comcast internet, secondary Verizon MiFi usb adapter.)
We recently updated both routers to [Kong]'s firmware mod of DD-WRT[3] and now the Netgear N7000 blows everything out of the water.
At our factory we are concurrently connecting 50 previously unassociated WiFi devices every 30 seconds and the dual-core 1Ghz Netgear just keeps on trucking with no problems. Our Asus meanwhile will crash about once a day.
Going forward we will stick with the Netgear. It seems to have become the ‘default’ router on the DD-WRT community, with support for other routers being forks off the N7000 code. Linksys just came out with a new 1.2Ghz quad-channel router but given Linksys has long no longer been ‘Linksys’ been ‘Cisco’ been ‘Belkin’ been Marvell, I don’t anticipate it superseding the throne despite the sweet throwback black and blue livery.
[1]http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/wireless/wireless-reviews/322…
[2]In broad strokes, DD-WRT is like a nice, easy to install, easy to configure version of OpenWRT. If you previously preferred using Tomato to OpenWRT this is for you. OpenWRT is when you really want ring-zero console access only with no amenities out of the gate.
[3]http://tips.desipro.de/ - [Kong] made some modifications to DD-WRT to work better with the new AC-1900 class routers. They are fast becoming the master branch.
