We tend to take Wi-Fi coverage for granted these days, but it wasn't always like that, with many consumer routers leaving a lot to be desired. Things like quality of service and mesh capability were features only found on enterprise gear, even if the Wi-Fi routers you owned could technically support these. To improve the feature set of these routers, you could install custom firmware like DD-WRT or OpenWrt, which would give you tons of advanced features that home routers just didn't have at the time.

But that was then, and this is now, and router manufacturers have gotten the message, incorporating prosumer features into pretty much every available router. Unless you're trying to keep aged router hardware running, you no longer need to go through the hassle of installing custom router firmware. That's even if you can find custom firmware for your router, as it's become harder and harder to develop open-source firmware as manufacturers have stopped providing drivers for various components.

6 Routers are more fully-featured

Custom firmware is no longer the only way to get advanced features

When I started using custom router firmware like DD-WRT, Tomato, and OpenWRT, Wi-Fi 4 (or 802.11n) was very new, and many consumer routers were barebones. Advanced features like NAT or Quality of Service (QoS) were hard to find, and installing a VPN directly on the router was almost impossible. Enter custom firmware, which was cobbled together by multiple contributors to add the functionality that the chipsets supported, even if the manufacturer firmware didn't.

Things like IPv6 were also considered unnecessary for consumer devices, DDNS, or almost everything that didn't simply connect your devices directly to the internet. Nowadays, they are expected functions of consumer routers, and it's hard to find even a budget router that doesn't support them. If you want to use open-source router firmware for the other benefits it brings, like security, stability, and extensibility, that's fine, but you don't need to in search of advanced features.

5 Wi-Fi firmware is harder to get

The drivers for Wi-Fi chips are no longer open source or provided by manufacturers

Custom firmware for your Wi-Fi router is pointless if you don't have the right drivers for the Wi-Fi chips used. As time went on, these became increasingly difficult to find. OpenWrt's Table of Hardware supports only a few Wi-Fi 6 devices; none are listed on DD-WRT's compatibility table. That's largely down to one company, Broadcom, which manufactures many of the chips routers use. The company has never produced an open-source driver for these chips, but it used to supply its proprietary code blob so that custom firmware designers could support routers that ran on them.

That changed around the time Wi-Fi 6 was ready for the market, which is why you'll see lots of Wi-Fi 5 and earlier Broadcom devices with custom firmware and very few after that. Other Wi-Fi makers like Atheros and MediaTek still supply drivers for some chips, so your options for custom firmware are limited these days.

OpenWRT launched its own hardware in partnership with the team behind the Banana Pi SBC, which has dual-band Wi-Fi 6 thanks to a MediaTek chip and a 'forever unbrickable' design to keep working until the hardware dies. It's cool that you can essentially make your own router, but if you want Wi-Fi 6E or Wi-Fi 7, you'll want to look for a consumer unit because custom firmware-friendly devices might not arrive.

4 Routers are more user-friendly

Manufacturers have made their setup pages easier to use

When custom router firmware was at its peak, it wasn't just new features that it enabled. Most consumer routers' graphical user interface (GUI) of the time was an afterthought and was often terrible to use. Custom firmware like DD-WRT fixed this by laying things out more logically and changing feature labels to be easier to read.

The GUI is no longer an afterthought to router manufacturers; even the cheapest modern routers are pretty well laid out. I like to think that the pressure that custom firmware designers put on manufacturers to improve their own designs contributed to this, making it easier to use the admin pages on your router.

3 Mesh capability is everywhere

You used to need custom firmware for this awesome feature

Home networks used to be a single Wi-Fi router, and you were limited in wireless range by the protocols supported by your router. Extending your Wi-Fi range required workarounds like wiring another AP in the low signal areas of your home and using the same SSID and security settings to hope your devices would switch between them as you moved around. In practice, this hand-off didn't work smoothly, and you often had to toggle your Wi-Fi off and back on again to connect to the higher signal AP.

Then, custom router firmware like DD-WRT let you set up another router as a repeater, extending the Wi-Fi range fairly easily. On single radio routers, it also cut the speed in half, as it had to repeat transmissions, but if you had a dual-radio router, you could get the same speeds by connecting one radio as the backhaul. You can still do this now, but purpose-designed mesh routers are a much better option as they handle steering your devices to the best AP as you move around, and other optimizations that the custom route won't handle.

2 The apps (probably) won’t work

App-based management of routers is amazing, but custom firmware might break functionality

If you've got a Wi-Fi router that has an app for management, you know how convenient it is not to need a browser to change settings. But if you put custom firmware on your router, the chances are that the app won't be able to work anymore. The one exception to this is Asus routers that are compatible with Asuswrt-Merlin, as the developer of that project aims to keep compatibility with the device-specific tools that Asus has designed. However, I have noticed more reports of the app not working with Asuswrt-Merlin, so your mileage might vary.

1 You can build your own router instead

Who needs custom firmware when you can configure the entire thing

If you really don't want to use proprietary router software, I can't say I blame you. But there are better ways to do so without having to resort to custom firmware on a router that uses old Wi-Fi protocols. You can create your own router with OPNsense or pfSense, and gain all the advanced features you wanted from custom firmware, but on a device you fully control.

No more fighting with manufacturer-enforced firmware update routines or low-powered CPUs with the barest minimum of RAM to fit firewall and routing rules into. By building your own router, you can specify any parts you want, as you can turn old PC parts into a router if you want to. That opens the door to setting up VLANs for security and ease of management or adding intrusion detection packages to keep your network even safer. In most cases, you'll need a separate AP for wireless connectivity, but that's easily solved and you'll learn valuable networking knowledge in the process.

Custom router firmware was a temporary fix until router manufacturers stepped up

Router firmware is almost unrecognizable from the barebones experience of the early days of the internet, and every manufacturer is doing a good job on ease of use and setup. The days of custom router firmware are almost gone, with modern routers offering easy app-based control, and advanced features like mesh nodes or VPNs. Most people just want a router that operates reliably and doesn't take much setup, and that's easily found today. If you really want to mess around with custom router firmware, the best bet right now is to build your own router, and have control over both software and hardware.