I've had static IPs for a number of years (first via Covad/Megapath then through AT&T) at our old home. Since we moved to a rented townhouse ~3 years ago, we've been using Comcast. Setting up the firewall system on home LAN was a snap as the Comcast equipment is only feet away and it's a short ethernet connection between the two. Now, we're going to be moving again to bigger (again, rental) digs. We're going to be switching back to AT&T---their fibre offering could go up to symmetrical 1Gb/s for half the cost of what Comcast is currently offering for far slower.

The problem: the access point will almost certainly be in the living room while my new office -- where the majority of the LAN equipment will be located -- is down the hall from the living room. As renters I'm not going to be able to willy-nilly be drilling holes in walls to run ethernet---nor will the rest of the family be too excited about an ethernet cable running down the hallway. Needless to say that nobody, myself included, would be keen on housing all the LAN boxen in the living room.

What options do I have to wirelessly connect between the ISP modem/router and the LAN's firewall down the hall in my office? I haven't delved into the Wifi equipment world for a while (our in-home Wifi connection is currently through an old Netgear N600) so I'm a bit out of touch with what options I might have. All I've seen online requires a physical connection between ISP and homeowner equipment. (And much of this was geared toward disabling the routing on the ISP equipment and using the homeowner's router as it was said to be higher performing.)

Do I go with two wireless devices? One to go from ISP-to-firewall and another to go LAN-to-user-devices? Something like:
This is, essentially, what we have now except for "Wifi-1" making the connection to the ISP hardware instead of being hardwired.

Any pitfalls to the above setup? Suggested alternatives?

TIA...

Do you really need the office firewall? How much bandwidth do you need in the office for streaming internet stuff?

A mesh router in the living room connected to the ISP equipment. You should be able to turn off its wifi or use bridge mode. Make sure the extenders have a LAN port which you can hardwire all of the server stuff. Mesh stuff isn't cheap but would have better overall wifi signal coverage and speed I think.

Thanks for the reply. I'm running web and mail services and do a fair amount of filtering for spam, mail relay attempts, and other garbage on the firewall. I'm not certain that I'd have the same capabilities on the ISP's equipment.

I was wrong about the location, fooled, apparently, by the coax connection in the living room and not paying enough attention to what was going on in the kitchen (of all places) where the previous tenant had an AT&T fiber connection. There's what I later found to be an old AT&T-badged Alcatel/Lucent or Nokia ONT that was connected to what appeared to be a damaged fiber cable. It's all several feet below an old wall connection that I wouldn't be surprised was originally for an avocado green Princess phone with a long coiled handset cord---just like my parents had back in the '70s). I suspect that all of the apartments in the complex have this as the fiber termination point. There is a single RJ45 connection on the bottom of the unit and, from what I can tell from my searches, no wifi capability on that unit. I'd call it, essentially, the fiber equivalent to the demarc box that Ma Bell had on the side of your house. The service includes a mesh wifi modem/router.

I'm planning on running CAT6 back to my office in a surface-mounted raceway. This would actually make the transition from the current apartment to the new a snap---other than the labor involved in the physical wiring part, of course. One of our daughters (who also works from home) was issued a desktop PC that she is currently connecting to the network via a physical cable and she wants to keeps it that way. (Neither of us want to go mucking around with her company-supplied PC.) Sort of stinks but, hey!, we'll get 20X the bandwidth (symmetrical, too) and five static IPs at less than half the cost we're paying The Cable Company.

I'm meeting with the field tech on Wednesday to ensure the fiber connection is OK. I'll see how things go.

Later...