A company I used to work for horribly abused consumer-grade WiFi routers for commercial purposes. As such, I saw hundreds of
these and their predecessor models over the course of about 10 years.
It was amazing how much they varied in performance over time. For any given order of about 100 units, they'd be pretty much all equal out-of-the-box. We might lose one to a manufacturing defect within 3 months. But after 18 months/2 years we'd see wildly different ranges from them. Many would be fine, most would have lost some noticeable amount of signal strength. A handful would behave like the aerial was disconnected even when it wasn't (and we even checked the traces for continuity).
Of course, those terrible D-Links were several quality grades below the Asus you mention, but it's interesting to see how these devices, which are still (reasonably) analogue, can age.
