Okay well I apologize for the poor formatting but that's what the edit function is doing...

In my humble opinion, the WDR-3600 is junk. I myself have spent a couple of months trying to get my v1.5 version to work to no avail. First of all, you're right about the range. The 5GHz range is terrible. More than one wall, and the 5GHz link is either useless or worse than the 2.4GHz band from the same router. So I pretty much gave up on using the 5GHz band unless there is a line of sight. This was my experience with the factory firmware and dd-wrt. Next, I have observed weird stability issues, where the unit eventually becomes unresponsive and needs to be rebooted, specially if operating under high load (like continuous torrent, and multiple other downloads). I have been observing this with many versions of dd-wrt and occasionally with the factory firmware. Dd-wrt people have hunted down a major atheros bug, but this router was not stable even with the latest dd-wrt beta builds. I suspect, perhaps there is a hardware issue, perhaps with overheating as there are no heatsinks inside. Finally, I installed another third party firmware known as Gargoyle. Under gargoyle, the unit was stable, and the range improved, only slightly. After a week of testing Gargoyle, I ended up buying a TP-Link Archer C8, because I found it relatively cheap on a sale.

What a great upgrade! Massive improvement. I am getting strong 5GHz signal with low latency and fine data transfer rate from a second floor bedroom. Personally, I'd recommend to get an Archer C8 or C9, and return the WDR-3600. However, if you want to give WDR-3600 one lance chance, I'd recommend to install the latest stable version of Gargoyle on it, which was the only firmware that worked stably for me.

Thanks for the reply - I researched routers for quite some time to find something reliable with good range and I thought the WDR3600 was the right choice based on all the positive reviews... Rated 4/5 stars on Amazon, Newegg, and Best Buy which is hard to do for a lot of routers these days.

I saw hit and miss reviews for the Archer which made me a little leary, but I might consider doing just that.

In the mean time it can't hurt to try and install this Gargoyle firmware you speak of. Thanks again!

Every router from a big vendor seems to have 4/5 reviews on Amazon. But the issue with all wireless-n routers is that they're much slower, with lower range, relative to the newer AC routers, even when you use a wireless-n client on either band. This has been confirmed in various tests. The issue is that 802.11ac routers incorporate various improvements in the technology which help even older spec clients to perform better.