Easy Question - Newbie VPN/Torrent

Hello, for last 3 days I'm reading about routers, VPN, openWRT etc. but I think I'm really dumb and I still don't get it.

Me: (Dumbo ofc)
500mb broadband
Only me & my wife use WiFi.
Budget £50 or slightly more
Current router - original from zzoomm local broadband company
I want to buy CUDY WR3000 (AX3000)

House is relatively small I got full signal in house, not much in backyard. But I think CUDY will be stronger.

Now my biggest riddle. What is best to torrent safely without paying much?

As I understand built-in VPN let me set up a server/client to router so all devices will be protected but I still have to purchase subscription for like NordVPN?

Is there different path? Is WireGuard another VPN that I have to set up and pay for it monthly? I don't mind paying once or few times to guys who doing good job and working on free software, always appreciate these guys and donating. I just don't want to pay monthly fees to some big companies.

What are my options? I just completely don't get it... (Started reading about it all in last 3 days). Will WireGuard crypt my signal and then I have to cover my IP somehow? Will OpenWRT let me do something different?

What is best solution for me? What you recommend? Please and big thanks to all of you, been reading different stuff on this amazing forum and learned a lot!

Both OpenVPN and Wireguard are protocols that let you stablish a safe connection between two sites, and both of them are supported by OpenWrt.

Now, what you are asking about are VPN providers. As long as they support OpenWrt explicitly, or any of the standard VPN protocols you will be good.

About torrenting - its about violating laws related to copyright. I don't really care about that, its up to you and your country. In my country god bless its not criminal to download files from torrents. And i'm not really using that, maybe rarely for something work related (some content that can be freely downloaded with fast speed (i.e. free content, not cracked or something like that).

  1. I'm the user of WR3000H (cudy). I'm not sure that i can recommend the router for everyone. The price for router that has anything that i need and its much better for different things for me was asus, its like 10-15 usd more than cudy, but their firmware in my opinion remove a lot of headache of configuration.

  2. The second problem - openwrt was new to me. I really had no clue wtf is that. I have programming & network experience, but its not good qualification. Because i'm nerd, i was able figure out how properly everything configure after ~4 weeks. Even time to time i keep return to openwrt and reconfigure, test, experiment with different things there. I mean its more toy to me, than 'configure & forget device' for now.

If you wish to avoid tons really tons of problems with configuration if you have no clue what are you doing - avoid going deep into openwrt (no disrespect to openwrt, sorry guys). Openwrt pretty damn big project, i mean it. Really big, and thousands of newances.

Asus default firmware support everything you need done in simple way + support.


what is my setup?
I'm from Ukraine. I have provider that i love and provider that i need (two different ones). Because of attacks against civilians here - we have like ~7-12 hours per day with electricity. While no electricity - FTTB works fine from power banks, while ethernet does not (switch turned off).

That why i need some kind of dual wan thing. Cudy WR3000H does not support it out the box, while asus - do support that.

For now i underestand how easy all things are after a lot of experience with openwrt, bridges, macs, and tons of mistakes, but at first few weeks - it was really damn hard.

So i have failover connection with fallback.
Plus i have guest network for neighbourhgs that does not have internet to support them, and the traffic from guest network covered by VPN. Because i dont want them to connect to prohibited websites & have responsobility for that. Plus there is forced dns hijicking thing for forcing DNS for not avoiding country laws + installed adblocker software to filter some domains & ads.

I have pretty good results with all of that, and i familiar for now with openwrt, and feel comfortable. But i tried original firmware - and its a little bit better out the box. Not good as asus, but better.


So what do you need?
Any router with 256+mb ram (512 ideally) 2-4 cpu cores for router.
Avoid Wifi7 and other crap. Even with wifi6 as i know now - you can't do too much too because of tons of limitations related to channels and so on.

Purchase any vpn (mullvad, nordvpn, etc) that has wireguard.
Upload config to your router via their graphical interface -> and all traffic will go over it.
Do your things.

Sorry for wall of text & wall of errors in my "igrish"

2 Likes

Cheers mate, really appreciate it. So now is there anything i can do to install free VPN on my router?

Thank you mate, appreciate that. Will check asus routers. Any good recommendations?

You must understand the difference between a “VPN protocol” and a “VPN service”. Using OpenWrt, you can install clients for several free VPN protocols. But finding a free VPN service (that also uses a free VPN protocol) is your responsibility.

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