tl:dr : My industrial-grade router broke and now what do I do?
I bought a home a year and a half ago from a guy who founded some tech startup company and was pretty tech-savvy. He had the whole house hard wired with ethernet ports and a combo firewall/router hooked up to 5 different wireless access points throughout the home. The router is a ZyXel USG210. The WAPs are all ZyXel WAC6103D-I units. Plugged into the router were two switches, one being a 24 port Netgear and another being a 48 port ZyXel switch. These switches run cables to all of the hard-wired Sonos Amps (9 of them), hard-wired ethernet ports, and other connected devices throughout the home.
Yesterday the router crapped out. The power lights won't come on, and I verified the plug works with other hardware. All of the access points are still functional, so my devices can see the wifi but can't obtain an IP address. I thought maybe it was just the lights on the box not working and it still had power, but I can't access the router via it's IP address when I connect to the wifi.
Now this router is more than any house needs, in my opinion. The company's website shows it being used for large businesses where tons of people are expected to be connected to the network at once. To buy a new one it's north of $600. Each of the wireless access points also run anywhere from $150-300. So we're talking about an expensive, overkill set-up here.
If the router is indeed dead, I'm wondering if I try to replace it with the same kind (again, north of $600), or just get something more user friendly like the various mesh wifi routers out there such as Nest Wifi, Eero, etc. I am not sure if I would be able to connect the two switches and their 72 ethernet ports to one of these though. Anyone know if this will work well? I noticed the Nest Wifi and Eero, for example, only have 2 ports, one for the modem and one other that could connect to a switch.
For a set-up like this, what router is recommended? I have a home that needs 3 levels as well as outside coverage. When this router was functioning I could get wifi in my front yard, back yard, and every level of the house without issue, which was nice.
All of the wireless access points are connected via cat-5 cables plugged into the walls for this system, and from what I understand the new mesh networks don't need to be hard-wired. I realize that the system I have in my home is overkill, but will these mass-marketed home systems work just as well?
Any feedback would be appreciated. I was pretty computer savvy and nerdy back in my UT days but have lost some of that in my older age, so I can tinker with this stuff but easily get lost in the weeds. User-friendliness is important to me.