My Asus AC86U gave up after 4 years and I am in the market for another router. I used to run the AC86U with Merlin software, so I'm not shy of tinkering, especially if I can improve my security and privacy. I sometimes work from home, but mostly watch Netflix while my kid plays online games. Now I'm back to Virgin Media Hub 3, but it's worse in terms of range.
Do you have any recommendations for a replacement?
I really hate to say it, but even for the geeks, I'd generally recommend some kind of mesh product. A roommate installed a parallel Google mesh product & it worked so well, had such great coverage. Google spent hella time making this product good, thanks in part to Google Fiber. There's a great talk on their finding from Avery Penarunn back at the first netdevconf[2]. I'm sure many of the competing products are also very very capable. They have a level of reliable, just works intelligence, even over wifi mesh, that makes me envious.
There's sadly little new news in the OpenWRT space. There's some on-the-cusp work with some new Qualcomm chips that might start working in mere weeks or months. But we've been running the same wifi4 & wifi5 hardware for half a decade now, basically, with no real options. The Netgear X4S R7800 is still the go-to openwrt router. MediaTek has some wifi6 capable routers[3] targeted to the low end, which are nice & available & cheap & modern, which is great, but decidedly low end.
Mesh just makes sense. Most devices have terrible wifi performance. Making them chat across weak or noisy links will hurt everyone. For most users, mesh products are quite affordable & imo a good improvement.
[1] https://github.com/berlin-open-wireless-lab/DAWN
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZcHbD84j5Y
[3] https://openwrt.org/toh/views/toh_available_16128_ax-wifi
As others have mentioned, meshing setups like the Google WiFi are quite good. If you don't want to have to deal with it, just set and forget, Google has been quite good for me and my inlaws. It also has family restrictions like time of day and app that are handy.
I have a 1700 sqft split level house. ~7 years ago when we first moved in we were having dropouts using a Buffalo dual band AP. I believe we were getting interference from a neighbor on a cordless phone or microwave, and just a single AP wasn't enough to get 5GHz (out of the cordless/microwave band) coverage that was good enough.
Reminder: 2.4GHz penetrates drywall well, so you can use fewer APs to cover more rooms, but also means your neighbors will have more opportunity to interfere with you. 5.2GHz has more channels and doesn't penetrate drywall as well, so your neighbors don't interfered with you as much, but you will ideally want an AP in every room where you have heavy use. Going to an adjacent room is ok, but going through several walls gets more dicey.
I put in a TPLink Google Wifi, and then added a 3 pack of mesh nodes, basically one in every room where we had heavy use (family room, living room, master bedroom (near other bedrooms). I started off using meshing, and it seemed to work fine. For the last several years I've run ethernet to each of the mesh points, so it is all using ethernet backhaul. That's my recommended way to set it up, any traffic you can keep off the air prevents congestion.
There are also "tri band" APs now that use a separate frequency for meshing, keeping it from contending with other traffic. Seems like a good idea, but I haven't used any of them.
My inlaws have a 4500sqft house on 3 levels, and their networking guy set up one centrally located AP. Coverage was TERRIBLE. But they also had Ethernet to every room, so I got them a 3 pack of Google WiFi points, set one up in the central location, one up in the corner of the great room covering the family room, DR, and kitchen as one open air space, and one down in the guest bedroom covering the bedrooms (basically a 100% dead spot). They, and I when visiting, have been very happy with the coverage.
One point I hope you take away is that when they say "Good for covering up to XXX sqft", that that is basically total BS. That's best case, no interference, etc... Plan to put in ~3 APs.
Addendum: Just helped a friend set up his house, which had some dead spots. Previously had one AP up in the upper floor corner office. When he got his new fiber Internet, I ran some Ethernet around the house. He now has the main ONT/AP in the master bedroom, Ethernet connected to an AP at the other end of the house in the office, and also down a floor to the living room with another AP. His setup is using Nokia gear, which seems to only be sold to ISPs, he got managed WiFi from his ISP. His place is probably north of 3k sqft.
Personal and WFH networks are isolated too via VLANs.