This is a great wireless router. There are many reviews about it on the net. For the price and performance it is currently one of the best on the market based on the reviews I read and my own personal experience.
It could use some additional features not supported by the manufacturer so I decided to use DD-WRT after doing some research. This firmware gives more precise control over your router configuration while also giving you the opportunity to run OpenVPN to give you a more secure and private web experience.
Why may this be important to you? With all the different companies, hackers and not so nice folks compiling your private information for their gain I though it was time to at least see what was possible to help protect my privacy and give me a little more security.
Seems like all the companies that want to track you; Google, Amazon, Twitter etc. are out to monetize you, since you are their product. Paranoid, maybe, but a healthy dose of wondering what they are doing and how they are profiting from selling your personal information my make you take pause. The hackers and evil people will just cause you so much grief if they get enough of your personal information, with identity theft being the main one.
So, following the DD-WRT wiki and and the Archer C7 forum I did get the firmware installed on my router. Seems to work well and is pretty much on par, as far as performance, with the original manufacturer firmware. There are many more options and is not quite as easy to setup as the manufacturer firmware. Overall after spending some time it gives you better control and more options so from my perspective this is a better use of my money.
It came with OpenVPN client already installed so I just had to configure it. My current VPN provider, AirVPN, makes it fairly easy to get everything you need configured to get connected. They have a faq on how to setup DD-WRT with their service. I will review their service at a later time. As for now they seem fine but I do loose quite a bit of bandwidth while using them. I may have to do some more testing and configuration to get the best speeds but currently they only give me about a third of my non VPN speed.
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