No mention of Mikrotik? I picked up a RB750GL last week, and so far, it's everything DD-WRT/Tomato/etc wish they could be. It works as a basic plug-and-play router, but it's incredibly flexible beyond that.
I have deployed a dozen mikrotiks with ubiquity networks wireless cards for wireless backhaul networks covering tens of kilometres. the hardware has been good, the software hasn't always worked as advertised. I find when I really get in to using any one feature beyond the basic configuration, it hasn't worked out. For example it supports openVPN, but only over TCP and not UDP, so I end up with TCP over TCP and all the problems that go with that.
Or I want to have two access points which route traffic between eachother, but also local clients can connect to either one. ap-bridge mode with wireless distribution system (WDS) can do this, but only with WEP encryption since for some reason one of the wireless cards must be in "station" mode for the WPA key exchange to function properly. In station mode the wireless card is not an access point, it is a client only and can not accept the local connections from laptops.
The support is surly and unapologetic. If your bug is fixed, in the next major release you have to pay to upgrade your license, but probably that release has some other bug as well. read the changelogs, the users are the beta testers. mikrotik are accused of being GPL violators as well, openWRT has not been able to support recent hardware. you get what you pay for.
If I had to deploy more wireless networks, I would use the ubiquity access point products, they've come a long way. Maybe I'd still use mikrotik for a router.
Another vote for Mikrotik. I bought a RB751G-2HnD myself about a month ago, because I needed a router with decent features and fast enough to handle a 90/10 Mbit connection.
The feature list is very impressive and on par with professional-grade gear (Cisco etc.). Only downside is that it's not open source, but it's updated about every month or so. [1]
You've convinced me! I'll be picking up an RB751U this week. Now I need to return the piece of junk Linksys that stopped syncing to my DSL line this week. The best part? The MikroTik is cheaper but better!
I have one of these, and they certainly seem powerful, but holy crap, the configuration isn't for the faint of heart.
I'm not a network engineer, I just want a static IP to be assigned to the router and simple switching on the other ports, but damn if I couldn't figure that out in 15 minutes.
In the end I had other things to do so I put it aside, but be warned that you need to be willing to invest the time to make these work. (or already have a networking background)
However, I'd argue that the use of open source firmware in this case is a means to an end, since proprietary firmware generally sucks. But since this is an article about how to have a quality Internet connection, rather than how to get started in router OS development, it might be more than suitable for many of his readers.
Check out http://wiki.mikrotik.com/wiki/Manual:RouterOS_features if you're interested. You can download the OS and run it in a VM if you want to give it a try before purchasing.