Leaderboard

I went through the same thing a few months ago when 2.5G wifi died on my Linksys WRTblah. The standard advice in the dd-wrt forum is to look at a used Netgear R7800, no longer available new, or its successor the XR500, which is effectively a repackaged R7800 with more memory. Or for higher performance, consider the Netgear R9000 or XR700. See that forum for a couple of others. The topic comes up frequently. I went with a used XR500 and stumbled into the fact that there are versions made in China and in Thailand. I found I needed the Thai version for the whole installation to work correctly. Flashing instructions for the R7800/XR500 are posted in the dd-wrt WiSoC Atheros forum. If you look at other routers for dd-wrt, look for a Qualcomm/Atheros wifi chipset. Because Broadcom keeps source to itself for its drivers, their chipsets are close to deprecated in the dd-wrt world now. I heartily disagree that dd-wrt is stagnant the last couple of years. Just the opposite is true. It's very actively developing, especially the last few years, with recent noteworthy improvements, for example, in its OpenVPN and wireguard systems, in VLAN configurability, and to security in general. FWIW, since this is a VPN crowd, I run both OpenVPN and wireguard tunnels to AirVPN servers on each of the several dd-wrt routers I maintain for my extended family. On some I run multiple wireguard tunnels. Virtual access points provide extra SSIDs, and policy-based routing controls which route through which VPN tunnel or simply bypass them all. The Air stuff all works like a charm, with Air wireguard especially easy to set up. This is all routine in the dd-wrt world.