Surf SOHO house coverage (and fallback using consumer router as AP)

Product Discussion Pepwave AP & Surf
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Hi, I have a question about WiFi coverage that in some ways is a follow up to this conversation. I currently have a consumer router, and would like to replace it with a Surf SOHO, mostly to improve security–I read through the manual and it looks great.

The consumer router covers my house fine, which is 2100 square feet, basically three floors of 700 square feet each, squarish. It’s wood construction with some slate floor in places. The current router is located in the top floor at the front. I know it’s hard to say in advance, but I’m wondering if the SOHO would cover it–the SOHO and seem relatively similar re speed ratings, I can’t find the power ratings of my old router to compare, but the old one has beamforming capacity, and I can’t tell how that affects things.

I’d just go and buy and try the SOHO, but I can only find it through Amazon here in Montreal, and don’t know how easy a return would so I want to try to check on this in the forum. (Unless someone knows a store where I can buy a SOHO in Montreal?)

I suppose as a fallback, if the Surf SOHO didn’t work in covering things, I could put my consumer router into AP mode, plug it into a LAN port on the Surf SOHO and have the SOHO manage assigning IPs to devices that connect to my consumer router. But, I want to divide those up, so the SOHO connects some to my main LAN, and others, guests, to a VLAN that is isolated from the LAN. I can see how to acchieve that functionality using the SOHO’s onboard WiFi. Is there a way to do that using my consumer router as an AP, to have it broadcast SSIDs, with devices connecting to them getting assigned to a LAN vs. a VLAN on the SOHO?

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@dmorris

You can find the trusted certified Peplink partner using the following link:
https://www.peplink.com/peplink-certified-partners/#NA

For the above question, this is depend the “consumer router as an AP” capability, as long as you can trunk the network from your router to SOHO

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Sitloongs, many thanks for the response, appreciated.
I’m afraid I don’t have enough technical knowledge: I’m very comfortable working with advance settings on consumer routers, but the Surf SOHO is a step up re. some of the networking details; I read through the manual, and see I could work with it, but still this is new to me. Thanks for the patience. Here’s what I can say:

  1. The router is a higher end Netgear from a few years back. It does have a setting in the interface where you can enable AP mode. So I’m pretty sure I could get it to work where if I plug it into the Surf SOHO, the SOHO could assign and manage LAN addresses for devices connected to it.

  2. What I don’t know (and I’m guessing this is where the “trunk the network from the router to the SOHO” comes in) is if (here I’ll put in a non-tech way) the Netgear can in effect send to the SOHO that I’ve got a device connected with the Guest SSID, and the SOHO then assigns and manages that device with an address on a VLAN that is isolated from my LAN (and the ones connected to my regular SSIDs end up on the LAN).

Again, sorry for my clumsy way of putting it. I’m really eager to move to a more robust and secure router, but want to make sure it’s going to work out.