Many people complain about unstable internet or wifi connection at home. Given the low-quality of devices provided by some IPS’s or found in shops, that’s not a surprise. I’ve had my share of cheap, crappy devices. They seem to work fine, until you notice unexplicable disconnections, low bandwidth, slow internet pages for no apparent reason. In some cases I ended up routinely rebooting my Sagem home router. The worst was a Philips router, unable to fully load a Google Maps. That is not how it is supposed to work.

I also had decent cheap Linksys and/or TP Link access points in my office and living room. They were outdated, not supporting the latest protocol. They lacked the processing power to accept smartphones, computers, TV while maintaining constant bandwith.

Then I decided to upgrade the hardware and change my Internet Service Provider (ISP).

You don’t necessarily have to buy professional appliances and pay 250€ for a reliable router — although it’s legit if you can no longer stand nasty peripherals. You don’t have to pay for high availability internet either as it is awfully expensive, and even a second internet line is cheaper.

Here is my setup. I live in Belgium 🇧🇪

After my small, niche ISP was bought, I ended up at Scarlet. How bad was it? Very. I did not want to switch to Proximus and receive a dubious B-box. Maybe it got better, but I have interacted with its lousy web interface, and seen several of them failing. No thanks.

I don’t want TV or a classic copper phone line so I don’t care for Proximus offer. But I guess they are ok.

So I went with edpnet. They are hardcore techies. They know their stuff. I’ve never had to deal with clueless support like Scarlet. You can opt for a FritzBox router that they fully support. This is important. In case of technical issue, they’ll know how to help you. FritzBox is a better hardware choice, suited for geeks and regular users, and it won’t ruin you.

If your home requires wifi booster(s) aka repeater, edpnet supports FritzBox mesch access points. I haven’t tested it. Instead, I bought a pair of TP Link Deco M9. Although it is explicitly not rated as professional hardware, it was used in the office with 20 people and devices connected before the pandemic, and it was rock solid.

Yes, it is costly, but a 25€ access point is not likely to provide the same quality, and remember, you want to get rid of that unstable and unreliable wifi connection.

You can connect them so that they act as relays, that is, one relays the wifi signal to the other, allowing you to "hop" booster to booster. This is convenient if the last acces point is far from reach, but it is slower. Or you can connect each Deco directly to the main router, preferably via ethernet RJ45 cable. That option is more reliable. This advice applies to other similar product from different brands, not only to TP Link Deco.

You must have a recent smartphone to operate them. It is not my preferred approach but it was no showstopper for me. Always verify that the wifi booster you choose can be operated in a way that works for you. Keep in mind that the latest trend is to run a mobile application to setup and maintain home applicances (wifi repeater, speaker…​ and I guess soon coffee machine and toasters). That sucks. I know.

No ISP has a 100% availability. edpnet has had it’s share of attacks last year, and one very unfortunate cable incident that I remember of. In that case, you’re stuck without internet. My backup: create a 4G personal hotspopt with my iPhone. Proximus has reasonably good mobile phone offers with 5-10Gb data included. You won’t Netflix&chill in HD — that is, if you don’t want to bust your gigabytes — but it works well to wheather the outage.

You can also pay for another provider with another type of line on top of your main line, for instance cable with Voo if you are on VDSL. That is an expensive solution, worth considering for a business in case your internet connection is critical. Personaly I can deal with the rare downtimes.

There are certainly plenty of other valid choices, probably even cheaper, depending partly on the amount of fiddling you are willing to put up. But this is one combination, working great out of the box.