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Guys, I would like to pick your brains for the following. I'm looking for a router, and apart from simple items like external antenna's, GB-LAN ports & simultaneous dual-band I have specific demands for which I find it difficult to find good search arguments.

My specific demand, is that I want the router to connect to my smartphone, that operates as a hotspot. At the moment I use a wireless bridge for that, but I would prefer the router itself to do the job.

And it would be a nice feature if it would also be possible to connect the router via USB (so phone is set to USB-tethering).

Can anybody provide me some good search arguments for these demands? Or even recommend a specific router?

Is that a permanent setup (e.g. you may want a 4G router instead), or for backup purposes (so you need a multi-WAN router)?

It's meant as a permanent setup. I don't want to use a 4G-router, I really want to use my phone. I gave up my landlines/ADSL and only use mobile phones/mobile internet.

The advantage is that I always have internet everywhere; whether at home or en-route (and the house doesn't need an internet connection when I'm not there).

In itself it works fine as it is now, using the wireless bridge. But since I do need a new router I'm interested to see if I can get rid of the bridge, and let the router do all the work.

The advantage of (also) being able to use the USB-tethering is that the phone is being charged while doing it's modem function.

Doesn't that mean you can't use your phone, unless you disconnect your router? Or are you using a very long USB cable?

Afaik only OpenWRT (and the fork from ASUS) support USB tethering.

Do I understand correctly that you want to use the phone as the access point and the router as the client?

No, I understand that is the current setup: Wifi hotspot on the phone, and a wireless bridge on the WAN side of the router to link to the phone.

Doesn't that mean you can't use your phone, unless you disconnect your router? Or are you using a very long USB cable?

I have no experience yet with the USB-tether option.

The WiFi hotspot functions well. What happens during phoning (which doesn't really happen often these days), depends (apparently) on the provider.

I use a dual-SIM phone (ASUS Zenphone 4 Max); when my Dutch SIM is active for data, I can phone without any problem (internet connection remains active, so all users connected to my router don't even notice I'm phoning).

When my French SIM is being used for the internetconnection, the hotspot remains active during phoning (so the connection with the wireless bridge remains in tact), but has no data (no internet connection for connected devices).

No, I understand that is the current setup: Wifi hotspot on the phone, and a wireless bridge on the WAN side of the router to link to the phone.

Correct: phone has WiFi-hotspot connected to wireless bridge; bridge feeds wired WAN to router; all devices connect to router (WiFi or LAN).

So for my home network the situation is (almost) the same as when I used ADSL.

When en-route all devices I have on board (other phones, tablets, laptops, E2-boxes) connect directly to the hotspot.

Of course the latter situation could be used at home as well (although I'm not sure if there's a limit to the number of devices a phone can serve), but I prefer to have a 'normal' network setup.

I have a similar phone setup, but with two low-data SIM's (UK and NL) and I have a separate Mifi router with a data-only SIM, which I can use on the move, or at home if case my broadband fails.