Unknown issues with Router (Australia)

Shengo · November 6, 2019

Hi, having some major issues with our ISP given Router and thinking of upgrading due to recent problems.

Quick information dump

- around 13 devices, 1 of which plugged in via Ethernet, connected via Wi-Fi

- Australian NBN, Telstra

- ISP given Router (Telstra Technicolor)

- 40+ MB/s download, only able to access around 7MB/s on Wi-Fi

My Family has been using the ISP Router that Telstra gave us to go with our NBN package a couple of years back, it's been sort of fine, random times (usually 3 times a week) where it'll spike in Latency to 4k+ with some packet loss for over 5 minutes at a time, and the DNS will just randomly not have an IP connected to it (A quick troubleshoot fixes that).

We were content to sit and deal with the random wi-fi drops, sometimes it would happen when someone would enter the house and their phone would connect to the Wi-Fi (Or at least it seems like that, happens as soon as they get into the house and calms down afterwards), but the past 2 weeks it's gotten progressively worse, download speed dropped to around 2-3MB/s, and finally today it just dropped altogether, could hardly access the Wi-Fi, takes a long time to load webpages, and a long time to load into a voicechat on Discord, we've restarted the Router multiple times and still nothing changed.

Today, there was only around 6 devices connected, including the Ethernet Device (PC), which was perfectly fine with no problems. We've contacted Telstra Support when the internet was semi-fine and they just said they could not see any issues and to update the Firmware on the router, so we've decided they're useless and that we should just to Upgrade.

We were thinking of upgrading to either the Netgear Nighthawk X4S AC2600 VDSL/ADSL Dual Band Gigabit Smart WiFi Modem Router or the TP-Link AC2800 Wireless MU-MIMO VDSL/ADSL Modem Router Archer VR2800, however the reviews for the TP-Link AC2800 worried us and immediately made us turn away, and the Netgear Nighthawk is very expensive and has a lot of extra features that were quite overwhelming for us, so instead we are thinking of upgrading our modem to the TP-Link Archer C7 Wireless AC1750 Dual Band Gigabit Router, as the reviews for it are good, it's $129 AUD, it does what we need from what we could see, and it's bound to be better than our current router, but we are worried it's going to be a waste of money, because at the moment we really don't know what the actual problem is.

Anything would be helpful, thanks!

(Quick Edit)

4 of us play Games on PC's, we don't constantly use our phones (6) unless we are away from our PC's so they are mostly sitting idle, and the console devices (PS4 and XOne) aren't on most of the time.