I finally did the thing I've been putting off since basically August: replaced the router. Not upgraded, not tweaked, just ripped the old one out and dropped in something new, because it had gotten to the point where the WiFi would drop every single time someone in this house started a video call. Every time. Like clockwork. You'd think after fourteen years of writing about tech on here I'd have a snappier home network than "the thing the cable company gave me for free in 2019 and never thought about again."
For the record it wasn't actually free. It's a $15/month rental fee I apparently just... accepted for six years. I did the math on the drive back from the electronics store and nearly had to pull over. Six years of $15 a month is over a thousand dollars for a box that couldn't reliably hold a Zoom call together. I'm not proud of this. I'm the guy who tells other people to check their bill for exactly this kind of thing.
Anyway, I ended up going with a mesh setup, three little pucks instead of one central unit, and the difference is honestly kind of embarrassing in how large it is. Bedroom that used to get maybe 20 megabits if the stars aligned now pulls the same speed as sitting next to the modem. My partner asked why I looked personally offended and it's because I spent years assuming our internet plan was the problem when it was a five-year-old single-point router shoved behind a cabinet door, which is basically the wifi equivalent of trying to light a room through a keyhole.
A small complaint about setup apps
Every mesh system now wants you to do the entire setup through a phone app, and I get why, but I miss having a web interface I could just poke around in. I wanted to set a static IP for one device and it took me four taps into a settings menu three levels deep to even find the option, versus the old days of just typing 192.168.1.1 into a browser and clicking around until you found what you needed. Not a huge deal. Just one of those small ways that "easier for most people" quietly becomes "more annoying for the ten percent of us who actually want to configure things." I know I sound like I'm 80 years old yelling about this. I'm aware.
The bigger thing I noticed, once the new mesh nodes were up and the house had actual consistent coverage for the first time in years, is how much low-grade friction I'd just been living with. Devices timing out. Smart plugs going offline overnight for no reason. The doorbell camera missing footage during the exact ten seconds someone was actually at the door. None of it was ever bad enough on its own to fix. It just piled up as this ambient tax on everything, and I only noticed it by its absence once it was gone.
I'm writing this partly because December always makes me want to deal with the stuff I've been ignoring all year, and partly because I think a lot of people are sitting on the same rental-router situation I was. If you've had your ISP's box for more than about three years, it is worth just checking what you're paying for it, because that number adds up faster than you'd think and the hardware inside those things is usually a couple generations behind whatever's on shelves now anyway.
One thing I did keep from the old setup: the ISP modem itself, because apparently my provider still wants you renting that part separately from the router even though most modern mesh systems can do both jobs if you let them. I haven't sorted that fight out yet. That's a project for a different weekend, possibly a different year, we'll see how ambitious I'm feeling once the holidays are actually over and I'm back to having free time that isn't immediately eaten by something else breaking.
For now the calls stay connected and nobody in this house has yelled "is the wifi down again" in about a week and a half, which by our recent standards counts as a genuine miracle.