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.

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.

1. My self hosting journey started off with some spare gaming PC parts I had kicking around that I was trying to find a use for. Now here I am with my media server that keeps my wife happy which means she likes my hobby ahah. Also Adguard for no ads on my home network - yay!! It's become a hobby now to just see what I can do with it and it's pretty fun stuff. I see why people find it so addicting. 2. The winning unit or units from this giveaway would help big time with networking bottlenecks. I'm rocking an old Asus AC68 router that definitely needs to be retired but the funds aren't there. Either that or the KVM would be awesome for being able to jump on while I'm away and need to take a look at something. On more than one occasion I've wanted to check something out because Plex or something wasn't working properly or the server wasn't available. 3. Honestly I find out about most stuff just from browsing this sub. Someone will mention something in the comments and then it sends me down the rabbit hole. Like in the home theater sub I just found out HDMI over Ethernet is a thing and I kinda want one to hook up a gaming PC to my TV in another room although it's completely unnecessary....but *now I can*. 4. If not networking gear as a prize - mass storage!!! Haha, I'm in Canada, drives are pricey, and I'm getting close to critical mass lol. If chosen to win, I would love the Flint 3 and the Comet. Y'all rock for doing this!