Hi all,

currently I’m living in 2 floor house 80m2 each floor and I get away with fairly okay connection with one Netgear Nighthawk R7000 positioned in the middle of the house on floor level. Usually the connectivity varies between 30~400Mbit and there is one or two blind spots in upper floor of the house.

Currently the wiring through the house is done as following:

-- optic fibre --> ISP/modem/router/all-in-one (AIO) with disabled wifi --> and then further each wire is dragged to its own room.

In living room I have set up my own router for better wi-fi speeds mainly because:

• The space where ISP modem / AIO device is located (and all wiring coming into the house and dragged to other rooms) is inside a wall with very limited by space - imagine box 20cm x 30cm x 7cm (width x height x depth)
• ISP Wi-Fi on the AIO device is poop even if the position would be better
• The Wi-Fi reception will be better than inside a wall behind a steel door
• I brought my old Netgear router from previous apartment and it worked as a temporary solution in the new house. The Netgear router software is much more responsive, feature-packed (I can also load openwrt to it) than proprietary things on ISP AIO device. Not a heavy router user, but I might need some basic functionalities working like QoS (multiplayer gaming), Port forwarding, VLAN, DNS setup etc.

There are a few drawbacks however:

• The Netgear router wifi will only recognise the devices that are hooked up to it, meaning all wired devices in other rooms will not be picked up in same LAN.
• I plan to buy a NAS and hook it into a wired connection in one of the other rooms where the wire is coming from ISP AIO, it will not be picked up by any wi-fi device connected to my netgear router.
• In upper floor I have worse reception, because I’m lacking additional AP.

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From the device standpoint I have following connected over wire:

• 2 Laptops (to ISP router)
• 1 Playstation (to my router)
• 1 TV (to my router)

and the rest over wifi:

• Cellphones / iPads
• Smaller lighter IOT (lights, switches etc.)

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What I’m thinking to do is to:

1. Squeeze one small wired only 1gb router with 4-5 ethernet endpoints right after ISP/modem AIO device into that small space and hook all wires leading to other rooms to it.
2. Tell ISP to disable all router functionality on their device, so it acts as a modem.
3. Use wired AP or wired Mesh systems (2 or 3) in other rooms so that everything is in one big LAN and that moving devices between those points is seamless

The problem I’m having is figuring out which wired router to pick (I will prepare a separate power outlet for it) and which Access Points or Mesh system to go for that will play nicely. Wired router must be small so I was thinking about UISP EdgeRouter X or something from mikrotik, but I worry they won’t play nicely with other mesh AP or may be too complex to setup. Also from EdgeRouter I saw some reviews that the speeds are bad if you add any additional functionality to it (you need to disable some flags / functionality to be able to get 1gbit speeds or something).

Ideally I’d love to get whole 1gbit (or whatever the cable allows) from my ethernet connection and at least 500mbit over Wi-Fi. Some of the devices I already own have ability to use Wi-Fi 6E. Money-wise I’m looking for something under 500$ which I hope would get me some good value->price performance.

I’m not a full network expert, and the existing cable laid around the house is 1gbit and should suffice for now.

Any help with suggestions is appreciated (either which HW to look at or the setup). Thanks!