Start with a Ubiquiti EdgeRouter X. It’s a tiny little box that’s easily hidden away and forgotten about, with five Ethernet ports (one for the internet, four for your home). The web interface is extensive and has every feature you could ever want and thousands of other features you can safely ignore.

It does not do wifi - and that’s fine. Because for wifi to work well, it should be in a central location where you probably don’t want half a dozen ethernet cables and other crap.

You can use it with almost any wifi access point (or even a full wifi router, configured to not do any routing), but I recommen done of these: ui.com/us/en/wifi/flagship

They have four “current” model routers on that page:

• U6 Enterprise - designed to be used by several hundred people at the same time. Forget that one.
• U7 Pro - the latest flagship Wifi 7 model (you said you don’t even care about wifi 6, so probably forget that too)
• U6 Pro - their previous Flaghsip, with Wifi 6. Probably overkill for you but worth considering
• U6 Long Range - basically the same device but with a physically larger antenna to extend the range over 2,000 feet under ideal conditions
• U6+ - a confusingly named cheaper variant that is also smaller. I would buy this one.

They are all ceiling mounted. Ceiling mounts are the way to go. Put them in the middle of a large central room in your home. It will provide perfect 5Ghz coverage within your home and your devices will seamlessly switch to 2.4Ghz when you leave the home (it’ll probably work on your entire back/front yard and maybe even a bit down the street… even if you don’t buy the “Long Range” model.

If you can’t drill a hole in your ceiling, then buy a thin (flat profile) white ethernet cable use 3M adhesive strips to attach it the cable and wifi access point to your ceiling, nobody will notice unless they look up. You might need to patch up the paint when you move out but ceiling paint is dirt cheap and very forgiving (because it’s matte paint).

It’s a bit more than your budget, but I’d argue it’s worthwhile. My EdgeRouter X and “Nano” wifi access point are approaching 7 years old now and they have never even been restarted except when we’ve had power failures or when I’ve moved house… totally worth the money.

But if that’s too expensive, you should be able to find older models of the same hardware (especially predecessors to the U6+). Like I said, mine is 7 years old and working perfectly. I could see myself still using it in another 7 years - anything where I need really high performance is connected to the EdgeRouter X with an ethernet cable.

Note: some Ubiquiti hardware is garbage, and the company seems to be going downhill lately. But they still have excellent products

EdgeRouter X

More info on that model:

• Supports hairpin NAT
• WAN throughput limit is nearly 1Gbps (outbound + inbound combined) when not using CPU-heavy features like advanced buffer management or VPN
• Stock OS is a Vyatta variant (Debian-based)
• Has an OpenWRT port, which might be useful if Ubiquiti ever stops updating the stock OS

WAN throughput limit is nearly 1Gbps

In my experience, exactly 1Gbps. It has 1Gbps network ports, even with “advanced buffer management” / etc enabled.

I’m sure it slows own if you have thousands of people using it, but OP isn’t planning to do that and anyone who is should buy one with more than four LAN ports anyway.

It slows down when using CPU-heavy features, even with a single user, because the CPU isn’t very fast. This doesn’t matter for things that can be offloaded, like basic routing and NAT. You can find multiple confirmations of this if you read through the community forum posts from the first couple years after it was released.

To be clear, though, it is an excellent value.