U6 Long-Range (U6-LR)

Fwiw, unifi can also do mesh. I have a temporary setup in our new home until I can pull wires which has an ac 6 pro wired to my router, and a 6 long-range in our bedroom and nano ap in the garage wifi meshed. They just each have a Poe ac adapter powering them but they are meshed to the 6 pro. Prior house each was hardwired cat6, and house prior to that I had only 2 of them but used coax moca 2.5gbps to the second one. All setups worked great.

ubiquiti is the go-to for mesh systems. In their good gear, the router/gateway and access points are independent from each other, allowing for upgrade of the wifi network separate from the router. They use POE+ for the access points - so like look at a UDM SE and hardwiring a couple AP's in mesh. You'll get seamless handoffs, and great coverage. I have a UDM SE w/U6 Long Range wired directly to the router, and a U7 Max Pro wired via 2.5Gbps MOCA, (one on each floor) and have excellent service all through my 2500sq ft home. Note unifi is prosumer, they're used by small businesses, chruches, colleges, etc. so their feature set is way better than asus or deco, or whatever you'd find at a consumer level. They have 'simple' and 'professional' menus, so you can get by just fine with the simple menus, but they will do everything and anything you can imagine, super well.

I have Unifi network devices in my home. I have a Cloud Gateway Max used for routing and all my security, which sits behind the ATT gateway via IP passthrough. The firewall, security and other options (like customizing your DNS servers) make it worth the effort to install. I have two Unifi U6 Access points in a mesh. One is attached to the network via Ethernet and controls all the WiFi (I do not use the WiFi on the AT&T device at all). The main need for my mesh is to reach some IoT devices that are located on the other side of the house - sprinkler box, Ring system, garage door opener - along with a Smart TV in the master bedroom. There's just my wife and I here 90% of the time, so what I have works great. All network configuration and management is done from my Unifi gateway using a web interface.

I have a UniFi cloud gateway in IP passthrough, and my WiFi is completely handled with two UniFi U6 access points. One is Ethernet-wired to the gateway and the other serves the other side of the house. Works great. I'm curious about your NAT issues. Using IP passthrough should eliminate NAT completely on your local network.

It's really not a lot worse that something like Asus, who has a decently robust interface (lots of consumer stuff hides everything behind "simplicity"). The payoff is reliability and a long service life (my oldest UniFi AP is 7 years old, still supported, and still working great.)

Just so you know, mesh doesn't bring roaming to wifi - any APs set up with the same authetication configuration (SSID, passphrase, security method) will allow wifi clients to roam amongst them as needed. Mesh uses what setups like Ubiquiti UniFi and commercial networking hardware use to allow *faster* roaming. UniFi would be my recommendation. It doesn't matter what your brother in law thinks.

UniFi - reliability, self-hosted, no cloud, no subscriptions etc.

UniFi has all the blocking and other features that you'd want. I have not tried it but it now also has ad blocking. At this point, I would never change. It's easy to maintain and upgrade etc. If something does fail, it's pretty simple to replace the component and keep moving. It's got a lot of enterprise type features that I like.

In consumer world - Asus and TP-Link are the better choices. Eero is great hardware has a subscription model for some needed (IMO) features. I would avoid Netgear, D-Link and Linksys - they are not what they once were and have subscription models, sometimes poor support, and varying reliability and quality. You could also consider gl.Inet Flint devices if you're looking for an all-in-one router, they have gained a very good reputation. I agree that a better choice than any of the above would be Ubiquiti UniFi and TP-Link Omada is also decent - it's different than the consumer gear. Reliability is one of the major points of these prosumer setups. I've been running UniFi for 7 years, it's great.

I’ve used Unifi APs for years with my Firewalla. Another option you might want to investigate is the Firewalla AP7.

Have you looked into Unifi? It’s not the cheapest and gets hate from the open source crowd because, well, it isn’t open source. It works really well though and they have a huge ecosystem to build out your network.

I disagree, I have 2 Unifi APs, both are connected to the same PoE switch (hence the same network), but one of them says it is connecting to the other because there appears to be a problem with the ethernet cable, it only gets the power over the ethernet cable but data is flowing through the other AP, then, this is effectively a mesh network. I need to change that ethernet run, but if the AP is working I don't really have to do it right now.

UniFi has a great designer tool that will help you figure coverage with the different devices.