In my other place I have a Pi4b running 21.02.05 that's with Time where we get userid/pass etc. That's fully cabled so I can have the 4b near to the fibre modem and the APs easily elsewhere. I am for now back in the UK and it is community fibre, their router offering is a Linksys SPNMX56 which is a bit rubbish TBH. I could I suppose swap it for a 4b, I do have one that is currently setup to run pihole/pivpn here but I'd still need an AP. I was wondering about grabbing either of MERCUSYS MR90X or NETGEAR WAX206 both of which are selling around £85 on Amazon any thoughts on which is the best of those two, as far as I can see the community fibre uses autoconfiguration for the setup hopefully this works before I buy a box. It is a fairly average 3 bed semi so no Ethernet cabling albeit WiFi coverage seems okay from the SPNMX56 in the rooms we mostly use. Or can I use the Zyxel WSM20 which is an AP but is it also a router?
While my remote device is currently 21.02.5 I guess I'll go with whatever is the latest. I'd like to implement something similar to the firewall update I have on the remote 4b see this post Firewall update script - #5 by pavelgl now iptables is not used is that still possible?
Based on the SOC, the mr90x (filogic 830) would be preferable over the wax206 (mt7622bv) - assuming (relatively) comparable pricing, but "community fibre" doesn't really tell us what kind of wan speed you'd be dealing with (nor if there are other aspects like adblocking, VPN usage on the router or anything special about the ISP (PPPoE, if you have an ONT, etc.) to consider).
Thanks. Their offering that I have at the moment is 150/150 I believe they other better packages . The WAN connection on the current router is a 2.5GB. There is no WAN info to be seen from the access I have to the ISP modem. It is connected to a adtran sdx631q ONT.
I'd plan to leave the Pihole active for adblocking
Regarding your router, you should only need to set up the WAN port for DHCP for IPv4 and DHCP with Prefix Delegation (PD) for IPv6. No PPoE or anything.
I'm pretty sure Community Fibre supply the MX4200 which is currently getting OpenWRT support. SPNMX56 is the internal name. An MX5600 (as the MX56 would imply) doesn't exist.
150/150 is easy, either of your examples would do that, including the wsm20 (if you're looking at sqm, vpn or just more of a margin, wax206 or mr90x would be better). But in the end, availability and pricing also play a role.
Find out if and how connecting a third party router direct to the ONT is supported on this ISP. You can experiment with this with the Pi 4 using its built in wireless AP to your PC as a test. Once you know that using your own router is supported, then buy something better.
I was hoping to stick a VPN on it plus updating the FW with scripts as I do at my other place so I can access servers but turns out Community Fibre are using CGNAT which has rather rained on my fireworks.
Certainly looks identical. Not in the supported list as far as I can see and with it's special FW to turn it into a Community Fibre special might not be able to even flash the generic Linksys image.