Replacement router for home

[rich888]

Hi folks, I currently have a EE brightbox at home which has been in use for quite a few years, just recently the speed has dropped considerably and am pretty sure the signal regularly drops out completely, it's reached the point now where it's driving everyone mad. The kids have Amazon Kindles and we have iPhones and computers so the demand on the router has been increasing since it was first installed. All connect on wifi.

In view of the continuing problems would it be better to purchase a decent quality replacement router such as the Netgear D6400-100UKS which is listed on Amazon for £94.44, would this provide a useful increase in the speed compared to the ancient EE Brightbox.

I'm no tech geek though can figure out stuff eventually, hey I even managed to set up the Amazon Fire TV stick yesterday and managed to make it work after about 10 minutes so was mighty chuffed with myself - actually this is one of the reasons that brought the slow speed of the old EE router to my attention.

Can anyone recommend a decent and affordable router or do you think the Netgear one is OK under the circumstances, I could phone EE up and request a replacement unit but guess it's quite difficult to get through to anyone at the moment so think I might as well bite the bullet and buy a new one.

Any help much appreciated.

[Mr Pointy]

Is your current router dual band, ie 2.4 & 5GHz? If not the a new one may well speed things up.

[rich888]

Mr Pointy said:

Is your current router dual band, ie 2.4 & 5GHz? If not the a new one may well speed things up.

Thanks Mr Pointy, I have no idea whether it is dual band, I’ve looked all over it and read the user manual and all it says is that it is a Bright Box wireless router!

[Paul Drawmer]

I'm not sure if a router can wear out, so there maybe an underlying cause for your drop off in performance.

If your home connection is low quality in terms of line speed, it may be that there are contention issues that are exacerbated by a lot of local users being on line more. The subsequent data demand may be degrading your connection regardless of the router. Don't know how one would check that though.

[AJB88]

Rather than replacing the router, add to it.

I ran EE box with wifi turned off plugged into Google Wifi x2.

I now run same set up with Vodafone.

[anonymous-user]

AJB88 said:

Rather than replacing the router, add to it.

I ran EE box with wifi turned off plugged into Google Wifi x2.

I now run same set up with Vodafone.

Is that mesh? I’ve got a Vodafone router which needs WiFi extending.

[breamster]

I would call your ISP first. Explain the issue and see what they say. They may do something to improve your connection if its flaky and/or replace your router for free if you have had it a while.

In the meantime, it may also be worth checking what channel your wifi network is running on. If other homes in wifi range are using the same channel it is worth switching it to something else. There is a 'Wifi Analyser' app for android which can identify if this is an issue.

[AJB88]

Yeh, there is lots of versions available, I went with Google as I have a lot of the other Google hardware.

[rich888]

Paul Drawmer said:

I'm not sure if a router can wear out, so there maybe an underlying cause for your drop off in performance.

If your home connection is low quality in terms of line speed, it may be that there are contention issues that are exacerbated by a lot of local users being on line more. The subsequent data demand may be degrading your connection regardless of the router. Don't know how one would check that though.

Hi Paul and thank you for the suggestions, you are quite right, it turns out that quite a few of my neighbours were using the same wifi signal channel so I changed that in the router settings and now it's all back up to speed again.

BTW, I connected my MacBook to the router using the ethernet cable to access and change the router settings, though assume that it's possible nowadays to download an app on your phone to do this, I'm a bit of a dinosaur so went down the ethernet cable route!

You wondered how to check for the number of users using the same wifi channel, there is an inbuilt scan option on Mac OS, if you look up to the top menu bar, hold down the 'ALT/Option' key and click on the wifi symbol a dropdown menu appears with a few more settings than normal, and one of them says 'Open Wireless Diagnostics', if you click on that a Wizard opens, ignore the Wizard and instead go back up the top menu bar where it shows Wireless Diagnostics - File - Edit - Window, and click on Window, then select 'Scan' from the dropdown menu, the diagnostics will run for a few seconds then show all the users within wifi range and also show the channels they are connected on and also recommends the best channel to select, in my case everyone was connected on channel 1 so I just selected the one it recommended but I guess any of the other channels would have done fine.

Note: If you're not using a Mac then take a look at this website for more recommendations: https://www.howtogeek.com/197268/how-to-find-the-b...

And a quick note to say thank you to everyone for your suggestions, and hope that this might help someone else that is struggling with their broadband speed.

EDIT: Typo error fixed and adding of web link to find best wifi channel

Edited by rich888 on Saturday 27th June 15:09