Which modem/router. Help

I’m completely lost here so please bear with me. I’ve been looking around and I wanted to get a router and a modem (or a few of each, depends if I need to) I wanted to set up a network through my house (around 1600 square meters) What I don’t want, is that the connection would be strong in one part of the house and weak in the other. The point where I’m confused - I want them to go through NordVPN. So what I’m not sure is, which routers or modems I should buy that they would work efficiently with NordVPN. https://support.nordvpn.com/Connectivity/Router/1360295132/Mikrotik-IKEv2-setup-with-NordVPN.htmI found this “tutorial” on their webpage, but I don’t want to order modems/routers and then send them back because they are not strong enough for me. My budget would be around 500 Eur for this. If I’m asking too much, I’ll delete this, I’m just frustrated that I can’t find what I need myself, but if anyone has some links that you think would help me, please do. Right now, I’ll take anything to be completely honest

Trying to serve a large house wirelessly from a single central point, particularly if there are intervening walls, plumbing, appliances, or masonry, is a bad choice. It doesn’t matter how strong your router signal is – your PC, phone, and IOT device signals won’t be strong enough to be seen reliably by it. You really want multiple APs serving a large house in “cells,” located near the center of each cell.

Do you have (or are you willing to add) cabling in the house for access points in remote locations? Or are you going to try to use wireless relays? If the former, look at running inexpensive APs like cAP lites in remote locations over POE. If the latter, look at the Audience product, and adjust for the fact that you will have to locate each one only about halfway to where you really wanted it.

In either case, you will need one beefier “master” router near the WAN ingress location; that is the only one that will do actual routing, and the only one that will need to interface with NordVPN. Depending on your speed requirements, that could be something like a hEX S or a hEX POE (for the wired case); or for more power, you could use any of the RB(x)011 series, depending on requirements.

Thank you so much, honestly did not expect anyone to respond with such detail! I don’t have a preference to which (cable, wireless) either one is fine with me if they get the job done. My home is still work in progress, so adding cables would not be an issue, even cheaper probably. Once I figure what some of the technical words you wrote mean, I’ll get to it. :smiley: :smiley:

Here’s my recomendation: pull a few pipes from central point to each of rooms and later install cables. Think about where you might want to have network connected equipment (e.g. laptops, NAS, TV, home cinema) in each of rooms and plan to connect with wires everything which doesn’t move all the time. And have power outlets next to every network outlet (I have one - yup, 1 - network outlet without power outlet next to it … my better half keeps reminding me about which idiot did not plan power outlet there).
At central point plan to have a ventilated closet for installing LAN equipment (if not NAS and what not).

This way you’ll be always able to install the required number of WiFi APs at almost optimal points.

+1. Nothing like having the freedom to plan out a good wired network before the walls are up.

And don’t forget to pull a few to your roof as well, for later use for security cameras, wireless bridges to outbuildings, or whatever.