Question Looking for suggestions / recommendations

[jnojr]

I'm looking for a good router I can buy off the shelf and install something like OpenWRT, Tomato, etc. on it.

Our house is 4100 sq. ft and two stories. Right now, I have an old Netgear R6700v3 that I don't think gets updates any more. I also have two EX6400 extenders. One issue I have is that my wife works out of a bedroom that's about as far from the router as you can get, and even with the extender her wifi can be pretty spotty. I set up a pair of TP-Link AV2000 powerline adapters which seems to help, but even with them, sometimes she has issues. She runs Windows and I think it randomly falls back to wifi at times.

My goal is to have solid wifi coverage throughout the house with several SSIDs... one for our computers, printer, NAS, etc.; one for guests; one for wifi-enabled doohickies I want to connect; and one for stuff I don't ever want talking to the Internet.

And I'm open to any other thoughts as well... the last time I paid any attention to this stuff was a long time ago, and there's probably a lot of goodies I don't know anything about!

 

[bill001g]

There is no magic solution to the problem of the wifi signals being absorbed by the walls and floors of your house. The newer wifi standards just pack more data into the same radio bandwidth they do not transmit at high power. The 6ghz radio band is actually absorbed more easily.
None of the above though is related to third party firmware. All these function are locked up in the firmware bin file that these software images load into chips. There is no source code or ability to change the software that run in the wifi chips themselves.

The best solution is ethernet connect to remote AP. Next best if you have coax cables in the rooms is to use MoCA instead of ethernet. Then comes powerline but it is rather slow, moca can get the full gigabit speed powerline is lucky to get above 100mbps.

When all else fails you look at repeaters. The key is placement. The repeater must get strong signal from the router and still be able to provide signal to the remote room. Lots of trial and error.

Your other requirement makes this even more of a challenge. It is not separate SSID that makes networks seperate. On a single router you can have a guest network when you run mulitple devices, even with ethernet connected AP, you have to keep the data isolated when it travels between devices. You need vlan support for that.

Vlans suport is not really found on consumer grade equipment. Uniquiti sell fairly inexpensive equipment that supports vlans. Not sure on third party firmware. For whatever reasons doing this is not as popular as it once was. I am not sure if it is just lack of interest or if the chipset vendors are no longer releasing information that makes it possible.

 

[cruisetung]

Usually you won't see off the shelf models support from 3rd party firmware since many developers depend on router donation from users.