Broadband contract ending - should I shop elsewhere

Estelle77 wrote: »

My question is: because I often catch a network of my neighbours when mine plays up, is it worth to switch to a different provider to get maybe a better router?

You can buy long ethernet cables & some of the power line adapters are quite good too.

The routers that you get free are generally rubbish. I bought my own router in 2010 that I use for internal networking and use the ISPs router for connecting to the internet. They are only now starting to give you a router better than my 8 year old router. It cost me £100 though and I'd probably spend double that when I buy the next one.

I change every year or sooner, just replacing the ISPs router & because my local router is the same then I don't really have to reconfigure anything. It means I can chase the cheapest deals with almost no hassle at all.

Estelle77 wrote: »

Thanks. If I get this right I will need to keep the provider's router to connect with the outside world and buy additional one to improve signal in the house? The engineer mentioned some booster like this and he said that it will slow down the connection. I already have the connection speed at the lower range end of promised.

It depends on what he meant by "slow down the connection".

Speed is measured in mb/s and is how quickly data will arrive. Your local area network (LAN) should be much faster than your adsl, so even if you add equipment that slows down your LAN then as long as it's still faster than the 11mb/s your adsl is running at then you'll be fine. The slowest Ethernet and Wifi you can get are ~10mb/s, but they are ancient and you shouldn't be using them anyway. You should check what speed your computer thinks it's connected to the router at, I would expect it to be much higher than 11mb/s. If it's not then the engineer should have spotted that.

Latency is measured in ms and is how quickly the data will start arriving. I wouldn't worry about latency unless you are into multiplayer online shooting games.

I personally would recommend running an ethernet cable to your office, or if you don't want to do that then use a powerline adaptor.

An ethernet cable is the most reliable as it's just a wire, it's also the fastest way to connect to your router with the lowest latency. It's the clear choice if you have other devices in the house that you want to access as fast as possible, like a NAS (which is a hard drive that connects to your network).

Powerline adapters connect via ethernet and then send the data through your mains cabling. They aren't as fast as ethernet but they are faster than your adsl, so if you only care about accessing the internet then they are a reasonable choice. They may add some latency.

Wireless boosters that connect to your router via wifi and then create their own hotspot are potentially going to suffer from the same drop outs & I would expect it to add some latency.

Does your PC show that it's not connected to the router, or does it say there is "no internet access"? If you hover the mouse over the wifi icon on the task bar and it says "no internet access" then it's a problem on the adsl side & changing how your pc connects will not improve things.

I have my eye on https://www.netgear.com/home/products/networking/wifi-routers/RAX120.aspx, with the ISP router just providing the ADSL connection. It's going to be expensive, but it will take many years before the ISPs provide one anywhere near as good.