Got mine at Costco. $169, I think.

I've stopped wasting time with retail consumer grade routers. It's almost like they're designed to fail after ~two years. I'm a heavy internet/VPN user. They all overheat/lock up occasionally (requiring a reboot) if you put a load on them or a high number of concurrent connections. And don't get me started on the crappy firmware they have and they rarely update. If you do go consumer grade, don't spend more than $100 or so.

It's not too much more expensive to step up to a prosumer type product like the Ubiquity AC PRO access points. Slightly more difficult to setup, but well worth the effort.

Yesterday I moved my 5ghz network to another channel and speed increased by about 8x.

Don't know why you have so much trouble with routers. I'm currently using Netgear WNDR3700, WNDR4500 and R9000 routers that have all been functioning flawlessly since new. I also have a Linksys EA8500 that has been trouble free. The R9000 is the workhorse, providing our primary internet gateway and hosting multiple dozens of devices and 3 HD/4K streams most evenings.

Thanks for info for the cable modems. My unit also serves as a wireless router. I used to have their voice service, but no longer.

Thank you. I will keep it in mind.

Thank you for your input.
I have contacted Xfinity re the equipment twice. Both times they kept saying that I should reset router and restart. They did not think there was a problem with the hardware. It is quite frustrating to talk to them, wait time was long and the nonsense that they gave me!

I agree that it is not worthy to tweak the OS. Beside, that is way beyond me anyway!

Thank you very much.

That means you are not a heavy user yet.

FWIW - routers do not usually last as long as computers. With a few exceptions, routers are one of the electronic appliances in a home that people do not power down. In addition, routers' exterior are plastic without any active heat reduction measures. So unlike a computer, a router is destined to fail. It is only a matter of when.

They are taught to say this, as it costs. You should do this:

1. If no router, tell the rep either issue a credit on the account. Also, escalate if available.

2. Bring your router for an exchange at a physical Comcast store (if they are still open).

For a novice, there's nothing wrong with your setup...except with that many different devices, you're likely causing a ton of unnecessary noise. Instead of having 4 APs, you could probably just use two prosumer APs and get a better experience.

I have trouble with retail routers, for the reasons I mentioned. More specifically: Poor design, cheap under powered components, buggy firmware with little functionality, and slow updates to fix CVEs. We have 4 people in our house including two teenagers. Streaming/gaming is near constant. I work from home (even pre-CV19). We use a ton of data, over 50GB/day on average. We run multiple VPN connections, both in and out. We have a Gigabit fiber ISP connection, multiple APs with overlaid SSIDs and separate VLANs. Netgear and Linksys junk doesn't stand a chance in our house. Right now, I can pull 500Mbps up and down via wifi (with over 50 other devices connected to 2 APs) to my local speedtest server. Good luck with that on retail devices.

The only retail router/APs I would touch are those that will take a good opensource firmware, like dd-wrt, pfsense, etc. However, that doesn't fix the under powering issues, they still eventually burn up.

Define "heavy user."

If your usage is so atypical (24/7 site mirroring/bittorrent/4K streaming, etc) then your purchasing advice is pretty much useless for the vast majority of home users.

I work from home, am often connected to multiple VPNs concurrently, have essentially two active households where the primary entertainment is streamed content to 4K-capable devices using services that deliver much of their content in 4K.

Oh, and btw, the R9000 does have active cooling, but is still categorized a "consumer" router.

I have a large property that could well be described as a "compound," with multiple dwellings and outbuildings. They're bridged using MoCA 2 adapters over an existing cable infrastructure; this has provided rock-solid service since we moved here 3 years ago. The WNDR3700 and 4500 are running dd-wrt. Until very recently, buggy ath10k drivers for the R9000 prevented me from taking advantage of dd-wrt on that device. Fortunately, Netgear has, as of late, been fairly responsive in addressing CVEs. I do plan to move to dd-wrt once the latest betas prove their stability. The EA8500 (which was gifted to me by Linksys as part of a promotion) serves as the guest network for the main house. It's currently running the latest Linksys release, but since it's behind the firewall and rarely used, switching to dd-wrt hasn't been a priority. All are configured with careful consideration of channel selection, and bandwidth/latency across all routers is excellent.

My usage isn't too far off from yours; we're averaging 30-40GB per day. The R9000 is directly supporting 50+ devices and all of the internet traffic; it's not even breaking a sweat.

That's good to know. Maybe they've turned a corner. I used to be a big netgear fan, but they lost me 5-10 years ago. Maybe notsomuch that they lost me, just that Ubiquiti came along at a not much higher price point. A few years ago I tried to dd-wrt a Costco version of the R7000 (I think it was like the R7100), and it failed miserably. Ended up putting the default firmware on and returning it. That was the last retailish router I've used for the home network. For some of the seminars I put on I use dd-wrt on an old ASUS RT-68U (I think that's the model) and it works fantastic (for just a local network to collaborate and get files from a server) and that device is about a decade old. I've burned one of those up (before I used dd-wrt) but I have two others that have been pretty good.

One of these days I'll have a "compound".

One of the nice things about having APs aware of each other is that they can automatically manage their channels and also make sure not to step on each other.

You will know if you are one.

I won't say this is heavy. You are connected. But this does not mean the router is constantly transferring data.

Good to know. I will keep that in mind.

What router are you using?