Not so long ago, I bought my own router. The main reason was that I wanted to have a good router at home, so I could tune it to my needs, as well as to have better coverage in comparison with the crappy ones that we get here in Spain with our Internet providers.
I got an Asus RT-AX5400 and I couldn't be happier. While there are much better ones, for my current needs this router does its job.
While the first weeks all I did was managing my Internet connection at home (as well as set up time based guest networks for my kids' friends), one day I discovered it has an option to setup your own VPN. At that moment I was not really interested, because I didn't see its value. Until I went to a public place and I needed to connect to the wifi. That's when I realized how handy would be to have my own VPN so I could be sure that I could connect to my home and avoid any risks from the public connection.
After that thought, I checked the available options in the router and I decided to use the built-in VPN, WireGuard. WireGuard is a pretty well known and modern VPN that can be easily configured in your router. All you have to do is follow the wizard in the setup, and you will be done. The tricky part is installing the VPN client for your Android or iOS devices.
In my case, we all have Android devices, so I only had to check what clients are available. Also I'm a big fan of f-droid, so I can install more interesting software than from the official Play store. And that's how I installed first: WireGuard client.
The client is simple and straightforward, but nothing too fancy. It gives you the option of adding up your VPN configuration, and that's it. On the quick settings panel you get a WireGuard button, to turn it on and off. It does its job.
However, remembering this process when you usually are at home most of the time is tedious. So I started searching for another client that could do the same but automatically. That's how I discovered WG Tunnel. This app is a client that supports WireGuard and that allows you to configure trusted WiFi networks (you just type the name of your trusted netowrks, as simple as that); and as soon as your phone or tablet connects to a non-trusted network, the tunnel is fired up, connects and you are protected. It works like a charm, and you totally forget about turning it on yourself.
This summer we have been in Portugal, and while we were there, my kids wanted to watch the match of Spain vs Portugal. We had the RTVE app from our country, which is free there, and I said: no problem, lets watch it. To my surprise, all the content was behind a paywall: if you are not in Spain you cannot watch it. As usual, the kids started to panic, saying we are not going to watch the match, we are doomed, you know the drill... but suddenly I said, let's install the WG Tunnel on the tablet and configure it so we can connect home and try again. Well, we watched the match without problems and the family was happy about it.
While I set up the VPN to protect my connections, this time it was a really nice hack to "fake my IP location" to Spain and watch the match from Portugal like I was at Spain. Thus, if you are unhappy about your router, think about getting a good one that has VPN support out of the box. You will be able to configure it youself and set it up to protect your connections from your home.