Taiwan is a popular choice, due to the combination of proximity to manufacturing in China and an English friendly business culture.
Every so often the big brands go shopping to build a new product and they select something that meets their needs from the white-label products available.
The product then gets customised for them. What the big brands contribute is industrial design of the case, some qa, packaging, ui styling, a distribution channel and consumer trust in their name.
Which leads to funny scenes like watching engineers at a white label do board relayouts and emi retesting because the industrial designer wanted the antennas to sprout out of a different bit of the case. Because it looks more badass that way...
This also leads to the phenomenon where say, v4.15 of a router was cool, but 4.16 sucks - because internally its a totally different chipset, with a different os (e.g. vxworks vs Linux). Ref e.g. WRT54...
The reason this happens is not because the brand name rewrote anything - they just selected a different white label partner who customised a totally different product to look the same (probably because they promised to deliver cheaper for same SKU). This then gets sold under the old, popular model name.
Too bad the new ones are ugly as hell. Oh well, my older model still works.
And these days so many people get it through their cable provider (or DSL, whatever) who have a marked interest in not generating support calls means you may get decent equipment.
You would think that, unfortunately it isn't true. Usually those ISP provided combination routers are completely outsourced - as in their hardware and firmware are both made by a chinese OEM overseas.
Believe me when I say there is nothing worse than the firmware on those chinese routers. They'll grab a bunch of open source software, reskin it, plug the chipset's reference driver into the OSS, then do a basic sanity test and ship it. You get what you pay for, and the ISPs want to pay as little as humanly possible.
I don't know what they do about the support. I remember one time we brought in an ISP's combination modem/router for performance tests against our device lineup, and it would crash if you ever tried to pull more than 40mbit/s through its ethernet ports.
They all work really well in the testing lab, where there's 50m of cat5 between the DSL modem and the DSLAM on the floor below. But then you find out once it's deployed that they have big issues with certain kinds of interference, so for a small segment of your userbase they have more dropouts than other routers. Since the company has already bought tens of thousands of them at this time, it's not really practical to just recall all of them and buy new ones. So the ISP files a bug with the upstream vendor. After some months of pushing, the vendor gives the ISP a special firmware build that's supposed to fix the problem. The fix never gets into the official firmware line (presumably because it has other downsides that the mfg doesn't want to talk about, maybe it's more conservative in line measurements etc), so now the ISP is locked into running this custom firmware version. Oh and that one probably has its own bugs that the older one didn't.
I saw this happen so many times, with routers from multiple vendors over my years doing this kind of thing. I don't run consumer networking equipment in my home anymore.
Their philosophy seemed to be to throw as many inexperienced graduates at the problem as they could afford and eventually it would somehow work - as though an infinite number of engineers would eventually produce the works of Shakespeare!
You don't have to use the integrated access point just because it's there.
I have wasted so many hours on the phone with their support without getting anywhere. They wouldnt even acknowledge there is a problem until I showed them graphs. Then they sent an "engineer" over who also knew fuck all and accomplished nothing. He then seemed to have reported back there was nothing wrong and now they ignore me.
I should switch ISPs but the performance of the network compared to the price is excellent. Just this shitbox of a router.
Now I'm wondering why, whether it's legislation or the way our ISPs relate to the infrastructure.
This is mainly because those networks are deployed by adding an second SSID to the router with WPA enterprise auth. The solution many people choose is putting the router in the basement with a lot of aluminium foil around it.
This is why we can't have nice things. I hope they find a way to defeat people doing this, but my guess is it would be prohibitively expensive (war driving entire cities, etc).
More a case of you get what they (the ISP) pays for (or doesn't pay for).
So you're going to have to start putting your networking gear away in closets, behind doors, like the rest of us ;)
OpenWRT is better in this sense, but even there some people split into recent LEDE project: https://www.lede-project.org
Regarding bricking. Linksys WRT1900ACS is designed with that in mind. It has two partitions, and you always flash updates to another one, so if something goes wrong, you can easily switch to the other partition which will hold previous installation, using special on / off sequence. It's a neat idea, and more routers should follow it.
If you need stability, go with a high end consumer router and load OpenWRT/DDWRT on it. OpenWRT and friends are very stable, but don't often take advantage of advanced features like automatic channel selection, traffic prioritization, or beamforming.
If you absolutely need features, go with a ubiquiti AP. My only issue with them is their hardware leaves a lot to be desired, and is rarely powerful enough to cover a full home, this isn't necessarily ubiquiti's fault though.
Business class APs expect you to set up multiple APs in the office, so their hardware is typically a lot less powerful than what you'd see in a consumer wireless router. A ubiquiti AP will gladly cover your 1 bedroom apartment, but don't expect it to cover your 3 bedroom home
DD-WRT has been pretty solid for that, even in non-ideal network setups (currently have it connected to the ISP router as a 2.4GHz client, then acting as a 5GHZ AP for my other devices).
They're very popular in Europe but oddly never seem to have had the same impact in North America, although you can find them if you look around a bit.
They did do a linux based variant at one point but switched back to their custom rolled OS a couple of years back. Not sure of the story there or if it's possible to do a custom firmware. There was something on google code at one point.
As an aside, if you're after a nice, fast, low power solution, you can also look into the Netgate pfsense hardware, eg, http://store.netgate.com/ADI/RCC-VE-2440.aspx.
Also, it's being made by people who haven't made a router before. 99% of the issues you'll ever have with your wifi router are driver issues. Omnia is using OpenWRT for their base, however they'll still have to make the chipset driver work with OpenWRT, and at a reasonable speed.
Even if they get the driver working, it's unlikely that the device will be running at speeds comparable to other market competitors. It takes lots of unpleasant driver hacks, custom networking stacks, and prioritization magic to hit the benchmark numbers that Asus, Netgear, and Linksys push out.
I'm not saying you should write off the Omnia completely, I just recommend sitting back and waiting for it to be released/benchmarked before purchasing it.
I think most non-geeks don't realise just how bad their routers are making their web experience.
I ordered a Netgear Nighthawk R7000 and I'm very happy with it.
I haven't seen a head-to-head comparison.
Now of course this is just my own anecdote. But it remains a fact that WiFi setup can be incredibly hit-or-miss, and there's no reason in principle why two devices 3 meters away should have occasional 2-3 seconds packet delays.
Not a hardware guy, but I've looked at D-Link firmware code in the past, and it is just utterly shoddy. Just making the hardware and making sure it is compatible with some router-os should be simpler. (Essentially what happens in the mobile/laptop industry with android/windows).
Why is this? It sounds like having recognition of your model numbers is a bad thing, if you need to keep revving them so much.
It's very hard for marketing guys to call Costco and say "hey, you remember that router we tried to sell you 6 months ago? well we just gave it a firmware update!", and close the sale
it's very easy for marketing to call Costco and say "hey we got this fantastic new router you guys might be interested in stocking", and close the sale
http://www.draytek.co.uk/products/business/vigor-2860
I finally gave up on consumer routers, and bought one of these instead - the learning curve is steep, but it's overloaded with features and runs brilliantly.
1. Wifi routers are very complicated. You need smart people at all levels of the stack to build a modern wifi router. You need people who know 802.1ac like the back side of their hand, people who know how to set up and deploy linux environments, embedded engineers for debugging OEM driver issues, networking gurus for handling the voodoo in levels 2-4 of the OSI stack, application people for rolling the user interface, cloud people for cloud support. Normally this isn't a big deal, if it wasnt for the next point
2. The profit margins on consumer routers are complete trash. Even if you're one of the big boys with double digit market share, you're going to have a very hard time keeping a decent engineering team staffed and your marketing team staffed at the same time while still breaking even.
3. Consumer router sales are SKU driven. There are dozens of price and performance points you have to hit to meet the demands of the consumer market. You cannot make be profitable with less than 10 actively selling SKUs. Every time you release a new SKU, it's a new opportunity for marketing to try to sell the device to brick and mortar stores that they're trying to expand into. If you aren't releasing 5-6 SKUs each year, you're going to have a very hard time keeping your router on store shelves.
4. Since sales are SKU driven and your engineering team is probably under funded, you have the exciting problem of maintenance releases. If your company has 50 supported SKUs and you find a non-driver issue in one of them, the chances are that it affects 10 other SKUs as well, if not all of your other SKUs. Pushing that maintenance firmware to 50 SKUs could easily take 6 months of combined QA or Firmware development time. As far as your marketing department is concerned, all that time you spend on maintenance releases is time that isn't spent on making new SKUs with exciting new features.
tldr: get a business class wifi router