Why would a user with a post like these need to adjust anything on the "WiFi" side?
Because non-overlapping channels are a thing, and without control, you have to assume logic and have faith in automatic management, a trait that is not as universal as you may wish to believe.
Which decade are you talking? I have received garbage from EE, Sky, Vodafone, Virgin in the last ~3 years.
You've picked three ISP's I know quite well both personally and professionally, including working for 1 of them directly. From the view of an average consumer, EE have used the BT Hub's for the period in question, it's arguably one of the better ISP supplied routers with solid performance. Sky's offering in that period has also been solid, outside of the period you mention they did limit the number of wireless devices that could be connected, but that's not relevant to the period you supplied. Vodafone... well, let's just agree if you make poor ISP choices based on price, you get exactly what you deserve in terms of service, hardware has always been dubious at best, but this is Vodafone, everything is dubious at best. VM's offerings are OK, they have the highest minimum speed guarantee last I looked (though it's laughably low) and as with most things, if you live in a former franchise area that was built to anything approaching a reasonable standard, you get a reasonable service. SH4/5 in the last 3 years won't present any obvious problems.
Which is replacing the router, no? :S Not sure your point here. Also DHCP Option 61 has been a feature of TP-Link setup wizard for a while. I migrated an ESXI Whitebox OpenIndiana PfSense install over to one for my mum, when Sky gave us some trash router a year or so back that kept having WiFi issues.
Don't you just love it when someone selectively quotes you out of context? Ignoring that, TP-Link is one of the few OEM's who support DHCP60/61 in any official manner. I tend not to touch much consumer grade kit any more, but in some cases it's been via beta firmware which TPLink are one of the few large OEM's who will actually interact with users and provide. As stated previously, and you quote later on, if Wi-Fi is the problem, on a like for like basis, replacing one router with another generally won't make a massive difference. If you're already running a virtualised ESXI pfSense (seriously, after all the crap they have pulled you put pf in?) install and migrated it to a TPLink, then Sky's router has no obvious place in your example, unless you did something dumb, like try and get it to act as an AP, and you wouldn't do that.... right?
Right - which was my point. It isn't just the "WiFi", it is the box dishing out it out, dealing with number of clients, switching, managing encryption, authentication etc. And often they are hot trash.
No. We're way past the point of this being a hardware issue with any of the kit discussed being used at residential levels, outside of fringe examples.
This is the post which I hadn't realised was you as well, which was particularly confusing. Perhaps you are just misunderstanding the more layman use of the word "wifi" to literally mean the wireless standard and not a generic wireless-internet catch all.
We're on the network sub-forum of a hardware forum of a niche hardware supplier (that admittedly has become way more mainstream in the last 25
years i've used them), so why is it odd that I use terms properly and expect others to? You can, and should, do better.
Which is odd because as you know most folk have all in one devices.
While true, remember where you are. Given the demographic it's not unreasonable to expect a higher percentage than average don't run ISP supplied kit and of those, a significant number have moved away from AIO routers because replacing an AIO when you want to change/improve one of the three main elements is inefficient and unlikely to provide the transformative experience that people are generally looking for. In an ideal world, i'd like everyone to hard-wire an AP on the in the middle of each floor and the same on any extension, run a patch panel and segregate routing from switching to make upgrades easy and only use Wi-Fi for mobile devices. It's not an ideal world, unfortunately. When someone wants to improve Wi-Fi coverage and speed, the answer is usually going to be my 'ideal world' option or a decent mesh system with a bare minimum of wired backhaul on the master node and wherever possible and dedicated rather than shared radios. Why? Because I can almost guarantee a better outcome than replacing a recent AIO with a 3rd party AIO unless they live in a bed-sit.
