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Because UTMs (like Untangle or Astaro) do far more than off the shelf stinksys/nutgear/dstink routers..you get so much more protection from a UTM (Unified Threat Management). Google can illuminate you on what a UTM is.
Also for those that don't run UTMs on their hardware, but run some other more basic distros like m0n0wall, Smoothie, PFSense, IPCop, etc....those easily will kick the living crap out of a store bought router performance wise without even breaking a sweat. There's a lot more than just running speedtest.net tests and seeing if you stinksys router can handle all 50 megs of download speed you're getting from your ISP. Factors like max concurrent sessions, and ability to properly and fully implement QoS and/or traffic shaping. For a single home user or even two people at home, no big deal. But for someone with a larger household of heavy computer users, someone that wants to be able to still do their online gaming while other people in the house are all downloading torrents and/or gaming themselves online and/or shopping online and/or wife watching youporn and/or .....and you still want good online pings? No problem with a good distro like PFSense...I can have 3-4 other computers in my house going full bore on the internet and they won't affect my online pings at all. Try that with your store bought plastic box. Yeah, DD-WRT helps out, I love Tomato better, and I've fiddled with many other 3rd party firmwares for the Stinksys boxes like Hyper-WRT, Thor, etc. And I've had more business grade 200-500 dollar bigger name routers at home, But unless you push your internet harder, and have tried some of these *nix router distros....it's hard to explain, just "trust me!"...it's like night and day.
Thanks for that - I ran a smoothwall for years and loved it to death, no more UDP packet death in CoD when refreshing a server list...but that rig died in a basement flood LOL. No firewall protects against water damage. I happened to have this WRT350 sitting around and it had over heating problems, a heatsink and fan later it works great. I'm gonna go dig around my spare bedroom now and try to find shit hardware to run a smoothwall on again and see if I can find a difference.
I also have a few servers behind this dd-wrt....mostly game servers, think my clients will notice a difference?
