It doesn’t seem like they give a shit. This is the company that strong armed NexusGaming with their repairs and have scammed a slew of people thru their warranty system.

If you search for “ASUS repair scam” they have a sorted history of this kind of douchery.

Yes.

Fr. Had me thinking ASUS Motherboards. Really had me going there😅

New ASUS firmware now requires a user to be 16y or older router and will restrict features and even security upgrades if you opt out

Like that?

Who is this "Tech Jesus"?

I worry about that more than I should. But yeah, that is the central hub that everything goes thru. I actually don't even want it to ping Asus's update servers because I can't be sure what kind of data is being sent.

I moved to Merlin firmware and hoping that doesn't have any telemetry. Unfortunately OpenWRT doesn't support wifi 6/6E routers and even the rare ones it does support, aren't really the greatest.

I want the asus hardware, just not their shitty software.

NP. I was pretty pissed as they haven’t released a new update in almost a year and when they did, this is all that’s been changed.

Good news is moving to WRT Merlin is a piece of cake and even carries over all your original settings. Hopefully they rip out this crap with their own firmware.

Precisely

Yeah. When I bought my ASUS router I was looking into OpenWRT supported routers but they are really hard to come by (at least in NA) and quite dated. Router manufacturers really don't want to have their telemetry removed.

Agree. Straight back for refund. In Australia we can legally choose the manufacturer, or the retailer. I'd go straight to Asus, to give them the message directly.

For the downvoters, in the US:

https://www.findlaw.com/consumer/consumer-transactions/what-is-the-warranty-of-merchantability.html

The implied warranty of merchantability guarantees that a product sold to you will work for its intended purposes. In other words, it means you can expect a toaster to toast your bread. If it doesn't, you have legal protection against losing money on a product that doesn't work.

If you bought the router expecting it to work as advertised, you may make a claim if it doesn't. They would have to spell out ahead of time what the limitations and requirements are in order to avoid trouble.

There's a few routes (pun intended) you could go.

DIY with opnsense on an old PC will give you the most flexibility and will allow you to build your router to your exact needs.

Ubiquiti is also another choice albeit a contentious one. Their hardware is pretty good which also doesn't require a recurring charge to use (unfortunately rare when you get into the enterprise grade gear). The software side is where people have such mixed feelings as for consumers and prosumers it's pretty good but when you start getting into enterprise level configurations you'll find their software pretty lacking. For example if you need a L3 switch for inter VLAN routing you'll want to go with a different vendor as ubiquiti's L3 is practically broken.

Unfortunately, lots of ASUS routers (especially the “gamer” oriented ones) use Broadcom chipsets. Broadcom support is severely lacking, (because Broadcom has refused to allow open source drivers) so in many cases switching to openwrt will severely cripple the router. Even basic shit like WiFi will stop working, because there isn’t a WiFi driver available.