Thoughts on Wireless setup

DavisBXL

Hi there,

Moving into my own house soon (abroad) and looking for people's thoughts on the following wifi setup, which I'm planning in advance before I have repairmen come in and work on other things like upgrading the electrical wiring (basically, a good time to do any works/wiring):

The house is a fairly standard, narrow terraced layout (3 floors, plus working basement) and old, so I'm a bit concerned about have working signal throughout, as well as the desire to setup a permanent VPN option to avoid geo-blocking woes.

Decent wifi throughout the house
The current plan is to go for a new, affordable router (Tplink Archer C7 looks good) to get a better all round wifi signal, then:

- Turn the ISP gateway box into bridge mode
- Hardwire the link between ISP modem and the Archer C7 through the wall (while already opened by the electrician)
- Place the Archer C7 in the middle of the entrance hallway, high up and wall-mounted near the staircase (presume if I went for the easier option and tucked it into a closet under the stairway it would seriously impact the signal strength?)
- Not buy any access points for now until I fully test out the initial setup
- If feasible, have the electrician run two (CAT6?) cables through the walls also - one down to the basement (office space) and one upstairs to the top floor in case there's a permanent PC/Access point there - give myself some options and increase reliability.

Permanent VPN router solution
Finally, unless I am completely missing the point, I presume I'll need to buy another cheap, flashable router to have a separate, permanent VPN connection running for something like an AppleTV (or equivalent) to be constantly on.
I'm struggling to get my head around if this needs to be hardwired into the main Archer C7 Router, and how it won't impact other devices (turn off wifi I guess - limits the use). Plenty of people seem to work off Tomato/DD-WRT routers with a fixed VPN solution to watch their home content without the usual hassles, but I can't see how anyone could avoid doing this without a dedicated, secondary router for it - if I (could even) set up the Archer C7 main router, all internet connections would be at the speed the VPN provider would offer, right?

Thanks in advance for any suggestions / experience with either of the above.

mass_debater

Have a look at smart DNS services, better than continuously running through a VPN and much easier to setup

DavisBXL

Good point, I'd forgotten that option. So I'd go for a similar solution: secondary router with smart dns set up.

Any thoughts of bridging to the Archer C7 and placement?

Thank you!

JohnCleary

For a home set-up, i've had success with the TP-Link Powerline Adapters... you can have more than 1 WiFi 'extender' in the house.

Also, if your router has WPS, it's pretty much a one-click set-up, the WiFi is repeated around the network as opposed to new WiFi SSID's