RT-AC68U

I still have an OG WRT54G in the attic in a box.  Also the AC 1900 TMobile Personal Hotspot, reflashed to what it is, a rebranded RT-AC68U, it's working flawlessly as a wifi mesh node. 

I use an old Asus RT-AC68 and another one at my beach place with an OpenVPN tunnel between them. Same subnet but split tunnel so internet traffic doesn’t go over it. Independent DHCP scopes so one side is 10.0.0.x and the other is 10.0.1.x. Work laptop is on a port that has been put on the guest WiFi VLAN so it can’t see my LAN. Gotta love the Merlin firmware. All works perfectly. Fast enough for gigabit fiber, WiFi is great, and I know the config inside and out. No need to upgrade.

RT-AC68U works really well. I haven't needed to upgrade to AX, yet.

I haven't upgraded my network to anything exciting yet as I live in a small apartment and am waiting until we move. That and my wife is sensitive to noise (and we both WFH) so everything needs to be passively cooled/silent so no grabbing a pile of cheap 1U anything and going ham. Future will most likely be Ubiquiti 2.5 or 10gb depending on price/timing. Currently my home lab is a bunch of gear hooked up to two HPE 1820 fanless 48port switches. One for proxmox cluster traffic, one for network access. Outside of that, every other segment (her desk, her gaming setup, my gaming setup, etc) are all Netgear GS series silent switches. The "core" pair are smart and support LAG (of which the lab, and my main NAS are pairs). Router is a Asus AC68U that works like a champ. Four netgear switches hang off it. The Lab/NAS hang off one of the core switches. Wifi is handled by the router which is on top of an AV cabinet in the center of our apartment. Wifi is only used for phones and IoT devices. Anything remotely compute, from a work laptop, home desktop, Xbox, playstation, NAS, is all wired ethernet. Why did I chose the above? \- Cost \- Silence \- Size The router was well liked when I bought it 10-15 ago :)

50 devices says nothing. Let's take it slow: my low cost asus router does like 50 devices plus 2 cameras with low bandwidth usage. No issues. So explain first how many bandwidth consuming devices you got. 30 cams or 3? Second, routers came in 2 flavors, consumer and business. If you want lot of devices with ip reservation buy a used pro AP or router. Any advice on consumer router is a joke, even the *gaming* ones. Regarding consumer ones, my config started with ac68u from asus and worked steady on 60 square meters, now I've got mesh in a 250 sqm house, added a more powerful asus for coverage. Anyway, coverage is easy to diagnose ny rssi and router stats/logs. Start maybe here.

You mention Asus here, and my impression is that Asus normally have a quite long support time for their products. The absence of a firmware update for a while, does not mean that the product is end of support. A driver behind why Asus normally have had quite good long term support over the last 10 years+, is at least the US FCC ruling where they where put under monitoring, after some bad handling of security issues back in 2013-2014. Take for an example the RT-AC68U that came on the market in 2013-2014 period. The latest firmware update is from october 2025, with fixes for multiple security issues. But then again, the newer RT-AC3200 have not received an software update in four years it seems. But in general, Asus seems to be of the better once in the consumer space when it comes to long term support.

Get the Wi-Fi gen that supports most of your devices. At home, about 90% of our devices are Wi-Fi 5. We've been using the RT-AC68U (identical to AC-1900) for about 8 years now without any issues. Can still get good Wi-Fi between 3-4 walls. However, be aware of recent "backdoors" warnings with Asus routers.