Greetings everyone
I am a UK resident who has a fibre connection (not to the house) with BT Openreach and my ISP is NowTV (subsidiary to SKY) and i currently use the horrible NOWTV hub 1 router to connect to the www.
I have just signed up with NordVPN and i am now looking for a new broadband router that i can use with this new service and my current ISP.
My network has 1 desktop (wired), several games consoles (wired), 2 smart tv's (wired), Synology NAS (wired), several mobiles (wireless), 2 tablets(wireless), 3 laptops (wireless) and a couple of other devices, google home (wireless) printer (wired) with 3 unmanaged switches and an old BT Hub to provide additional wireless coverage.
We use Netfilx UK (would also like to use USA via VPN), NOWTV, Amazon Prime, google home, spotify.
I need a router/modem that can cope with this, i am not that bothered about the number of connections 4 LAN would be good but i could cope with just 2.
I have seen on Amazon.co.uk several mini routers and full blown routers, but i don't know if they will work with NowTV's "unique" ISP methods.
Budget....around £100 if that is possible?
Not sure if i would also need an old BT Open Reach modem to work with these, i know these are available on ebay very cheaply.
Yay!! Youre the first person ive seen in over a month who is asking “what should i buy”, vs ‘ive already bought something, will it do what i want?”
First, a word about modems. Because they are mostly all using closed source drivers, there are only a few all-in-one devices that openwrt can support the modems on. But, that doesnt necessarily matter, since most isps have at least a basic modem or have an upgrade option, and openwrt has support for hundreds of routers out there and they can be configured to work together just fine.
If you go with two devices (modem +router), look into your modem’s manuel for running it in bridged mode. This turns it into a dumb switch device - basically only utilsiing the modem and nothing else.. then you would connect the wan port on the openwrt device and configure the relevant protocols that your isp required.
Have a look at the openwrt ideal hardware page , im not familiar with UK fiber providers, but you might get lucky and find a device that can do everything.
Bare in mind that installing openwrt carries a little bit of risk - you might brick the device you buy , but if you do, there should be ways to recover it , or else ask on here in another thread and people usually try and help if they can. If youre patient and careful, and invest a few hours (3-30) youll probably be quite happy with the result.
Maxing a 100mb (or even faster) connection on vpn is a bit more tricky, heres a thread from last year with discussion : Router for VPN server
It's best to check with NowTV first whether they allow connection by a third-party modem. FYI. Sky is very restrictive, and to connect to Sky lines, OpenWrt users have to get their login/passwords from and spoof MAC addresses of their original Sky modems. I do not know whether it is the same with NowTV.
An unlocked BT Home Hub 5 Type A is one of popular models in the UK, but it won't be able to deliver 100mbps via VPN. Even something like rPi will struggle to reach this target. You may be better off using a dedicated x86 cpu as a vpn server in your network.