I recently bought a Netgear Nighthawk R7000 for my home router. I figured it would be a good time to get a new router, so I was debating between this on and the ASUS (RT-AC68U). I chose the Nighthawk purely based on price. It was 10% off at Target. 🙂 When I shop for a router, I normally try to get open-source. The reason for this is so that I can hack it as I enjoy doing things like that and I like to use features that are not designed the original product. Why companies build routers and put their own firmware on it is beside me. I really wonder why they don’t just use the open-source stuff since it’s so good. If you look at my blog, you’ll see that I have run DD-WRT on my older routers as well.
The reason I decided to go with Tomato instead of DD-WRT is because of a couple of features that I like in Tomato. The first feature is the QOS transfer rates.
I haven’t found where I can easily do this in DD-WRT. The reason I like this feature is because I can instantly know who is using up my bandwidth.
Another feature I like that unfortunately does not work on this router yet is A feature where I could see all of the URLs that I’ve visited and searches that I’ve done. I hope that Shibby fixes this in the 121 build.
These are the two major reasons why I decided to use Tomato over DD-WRT. I’ve also run into issues with using the wireless bridge feature in DD-WRT where Tomato worked very easily.
I would love for some DD-WRT hardcore fans to debate with me. I’ve used DD-WRT firmware for a long time and just switched to Tomato very recently. The main reason I switched to Tomato was back in the days when I had the ASUS RT-N16 router. DD-WRT had Wi-Fi that kept dropping off almost daily and I had to find something better and Tomato was the answer at the time.
Please post your comments! Thanks!
P.S. Here‘s a good link on how to set up DD-WRT with a VPN.