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My recommendations for the most secure options for home or small office use:

Dedicated hardware: Asuswrt-Merlin ( https://asuswrt.lostrealm.ca/ ) combined with one of the compatible ASUS router models. It's being actively supported; new versions appear every one to two months, and would likely appear more quickly if there were a major zero-day exploit. Not as feature-rich as DD-WRT or the like but more frequently updated.

Build your own PC or pre-configured PC: pfSense ( https://www.pfsense.org/ ) or OPNsense ( https://opnsense.org/ ). OPNsense is a fork of pfSense, which in turn is a fork of the now unsupported m0n0wall. They're based on FreeBSD. The companies sell pre-configured systems and support contracts as a source of income, but the software is free and open source and you can roll your own system. A PC has more memory and computing power than a dedicated router box, so these are more feature-rich than anything that runs on one of those boxes.

ASUS actually DOES make some great routers. But only if you unlock their full potential by running DD-WRT or ASUSWRT-Merlin on them. Suitable routers include the RT-AC66U, RT-AC68U, RT-AC86U, RT-AC88U, and RT-AC5300. Info on ASUSWRT-Merlin is here: https://asuswrt.lostrealm.ca/a...

The ASUS Merlin project created custom firmware for ASUS routers, maybe this is a limited opportunity to create custom firmware for the AT&T modems that can increase security and add features.

You need to have a look at the Asus-merlin project as well. It's a custom firmware for Asus routers. It includes a persistant JFFS partition and a raft of other cool features. I've had three, and the only complaint that I have is that, under load, they can get up to 50 C. The lower memory 520gU was the only one that I encountered a lock up issue with (when downloading several files from a CDN with Download-them-all) and video streaming, and that was only 1-2x per year. All of the others have been extremely stable, even with heavy downloads and video streaming.

The way this works with British Telecom is that you have multiple SIDs on your router. There's one you connect to that you have control over, and there are also additional SIDs like "BTWifi-with-FON" and "BTWifi-X" with separate IP address and logging that you have no control over.
I think that BT internet customers have a free access to these all over the country and if they opt-out of this they can then get it disabled on their own home router. This way BT claims they literally have millions of WIFI access points all over the country, yet the experience is terrible if actually the network is on residential ADSL (upstream capped to 448kb/s for instance).

Incidentally I've wondered whether you could just replace their ADSL or VDSL (FTTC) router with something of your own without these additional access points and still been able to access their national network of access points for free.

Not quite the way it works bud. You DO have control over the public hotspot.. in settings you can turn it on or off.
/my advice would be to opt into the BT wifi scheme on the BT website, connect your router with it opted in. BT then gets a wee signal from it and you are then verified and allowed on the fon network and their partners worldwide. THEN.. turn the fucking public wifi off and you'll never have a problem.. it's only ever checked once

Also it's a trivial matter to change router. I have this puppy which is future proof enough for me, can handle any isp/connection type(adsl,vdsl, cable) and when you run the Asuswrt-Merlin firmware . it gives you a lot more settings to tweat and explore and is a pretty fucking rock solid router and it looks sweet :P
BTW your BT connection username and password is user = BT passie = user i shit you not.

I left BT and moved to talktalk... I know. they are SHITE but at 26 quids all in for 80mb down and 20mb up including phone charges(just tell them you will go to sky.. they'll give you an offer) and i am 60 meters by wire from the cabinet. I am in the process of getting all the other flats on my stair to sign up to http://hyperoptic.com/ ... only one more place out the six to get to sign up and it's happy fucking days for me :P.

also.. i can STILL use my BT-wifi/FON login anywhere in the world and it's been 6 months since i left BT and i've used it here in Scotland, in England,in Portugal, Denver,Houston, Amsterdam New Jersey and the Republic of Ireland. it's the gift that keeps on giving as the turds are too lazy to check status more than the initial one :P

These Asus models use AsusWRT, a derivative of the Linux based OpenWRT. All the source code is public, and there are even alternate builds that track Asus's code but with additional features. (The problem is fixed already in that one)

They are writing some major garbage in-house, like Asus's terrible AiCloud, but those are not the core routing features; those they just pull in from Linux. In this case, the bug is in the router side code that supports their "ASUS Wireless Router Device Discovery Utility".

Factory firmware is a lot more capable now than it was ten years ago, since the developers have been cribbing from DD-WRT, OpenWRT, and Tomato over the intervening time. Ten years ago, the stock firmware was much less capable than the hardware it was controlling; today, that's not nearly so much the case. However, if you want to, there's Shibby's tomato, or Merlin, or even DD-WRT itself. All support popular modern routers.