Maintenance-free fibre router?

I'm looking for a router to replace my free Plusnet Technicolour router, to try to improve wifi speeds around the house. All the best-rated routers seem to be above £100. Is there a router under £100 which will give me a stable connection and good wifi? I need one that's maintenance-free, i.e. set-and-forget, so I don't need to do firmware updates (scary things...).

I don't mind whether I get a new router to plug into the Openreach modem or get an all-in-one modem/router.

Just to set the context, I get almost 76 Mbps via ethernet but the wifi speeds go from 1 Mbps up to 50 Mbps in the same room, getting around 30 Mbps most of the time. But I frequently have to change channels when the speed drops into single figures.

WiFi speeds, WiFi stability or interference free WiFI?

Before you take the plunge you need to try and understand why you are having problems. Is it because there are too many other WAPs close by and neighbours who continually stream TV, films &c. How big is the house? What are the walls made of?

Are you with Plusnet? It sounds like you still are, on their 80/20 package?
When I upgraded from the 40/20 deal I persuaded Plusnet to give me a new router - their so-called Hub One router. It's just a rebranded Home Hub 5, which is a pretty reasonable quality VDSL router.

If they won't send you one you can always buy yourself a BT Home Hub 5 from ebay. There are a lot on there, which keeps the price down. I got mine for £20, by waiting for a good deal.

It is a Wireless ac router, which means it gives out both a 2.4MHz wifi signal and a 5MHz signal. The latter gives me up to 66Mb/s when I am near the router.

It's a 3-bed semi with normal brick walls. Neighbourhood seems to have lots of wifi devices as they show up on my PC. When I spoke to Plusnet a long while ago they suggested the speed problems must be due to interference from other devices, which is why I often change channels on the router.

Our BT socket where the modem is plugged in is unfortunately next to the controller for the burglar alarm, which is fixed to the wall. I wonder if that's the interference. Or it could be the neighbours.

Yes, I am still with Plusnet on what must be the 80/20 package, since I get about 76 Mbps on ethernet. I used to have two other problems apart from the up-and-down wifi speeds: the connection used to drop a lot and the browser often said "Connecting..." for a long time when I tried to go any website. Thanks to some advice I got here and elsewhere, the other two problems got solved. Upgrading to Windows 10 eliminated the dropped connections, and changing from the Plusnet DNS servers to Google DNS servers solved the problem of the browser getting stuck on "Connecting..." So now I am left with just the variable wifi speeds as the problem.

When I upgraded to the 80/20 fibre I should have been smart enough to get Plusnet to give me a good router. But I didn't think of it, so now I am thinking of spending £50-100 or so to get a good router, hoping that will give me consistently fast wifi.

Quite happy with my BiPAC 8800NL, although only on 40/20. I believe it is still an effective router on 80/20 too.

Mark

I have a Billion 6300NXL. I've never known it crash and it stays connected 24/7 (I host my own mail server so can't afford down time). It also supports dual-stack IPv6/4 as I proved with my previous ISP. The only downsides are:

* It doesn't have a 'disconnect' option on the UI so restarting is the only way to bounce your PPP session that takes longer and disrupts the LAN.
* By default it runs an open DNS server(*) on the public WAN. To disable it you have to forward port 53 to an unused IP address.

I'm not sure how good the wifi is as I use a separate WAP. The 6300 also supports dual EWAN so you could stick a 3G USB stick into it and use that as a backup in case your main connection fails.

(*)It seems most Billions do. You can disable this on some of them as outlined here ( https://support.aa.net.uk/Stopping_Open_DNS_-_Billion ) but changing the filtering didn't work for me.

Edited by Andrue (Fri 22-Jan-16 20:16:35)

Is te alarm wired or wireless? A wired one is unlikely to cause WiFi issues - it may cause some minor problems on the actual DSL side if the PSU is noisy however from what you have said that is not as issue.

It does sound like interference, in which case possibly moving to a wired netwrok with some localised WAPS may be a solution although if there are large number of other WiFI users your problem may not go away and just get worse.

The burglar alarm is wireless so that's what makes me suspect it may be causing some interference.

I hadn't heard of WAPS but will read up on it. Thanks.

Get a dual band wireless device or access point to add to existing router assuming you wireless kit like phones/tablets supports 802.11a and 802.11ac which is the 5GHz band which is generally less congested.