Hi all,
What do you think?
I will chip in my twaPennies worth too- "It Depends!"
I would say that how you judge depends on what your priorities are and hence which criteria you value above others.
My experience has been coloured by my own priorities.
I went right off Linksys because for a few years they were plagued with premature component death - from cheap manufacture, poor heatsinks and nasty capacitors etc - but they seem to be past that now.
I went right off Netgear because you find yourself with perfectly good hardware but they have abandoned security and maintenance of their (HUGE) installed base -in a cynical attempt to get people to buy new replacement units.
Asus does seem to be up and coming. They use linux as their OS and seem to do less of the 'willfully castrating perfectly good hardware' ruse in order to get you to spend more on their next more expensive model with more 'features' - which with Netgear is often _the_same_chipset_ in a larger plastic case but with a (slightly) less castrated Linux build on it.
These days I have learned, like Kitz, that the most important thing is the chipset.
Again -agreeing with Kitz- I have had a few TI/lantiq/Infineon devices (they have open drivers for the hardware) but the DSL PHY side performance is just not as good as a modern Broadcom.
Do yourself a favour and buy a broadcom _modem_
the run a separate _router_ with community supported firmware.
Choose between the slick UI of Gargoyle
http://www.gargoyle-router.com/or the full-fat Linux version from OpenWRT
http://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/startYou will never go back to the crippled,insecure,overpriced abandonware that is the shockingly poor state of consumer embedded systems - after you free your first router and truly appreciate just how adaptable and versatile these little devices can be.
</endz open source preaching>