Router keeps dropping WiFi, with an ecobee & room sensors and a ring doorbell its driving me up the wall. Need something reliable with WiFi, my service is 15mbps so I don't need too much on the speed side, just WiFi reliability.
Which brand / model of router do you have? Have you analyzed all the wifi bands in your house to determine whether you're on the least polluted channel? Nearby wifi routers, wireless printers, and other wifi broadcasting devices in your neighborhood could be causing signal pollution, degrading the reliability and usable distance between your router and your wireless clients.
This Android app seems to be a pretty good one, if you want to use your phone to determine the least populated channel and switch to it. If you prefer to use a laptop,
this Windows app is another good wifi analyzer.
But yeah, it could also be that your router has buggy firmware. Most do. Trouble is, the life cycle of support for consumer-grade routers is so short that it's not worthwhile for the manufacturers to track down the bugs and fix them. Instead, the recommended fix is to power cycle the router, and repeat until you're no longer eligible for support. If there were no bugs, there would be no need to reboot under any circumstance other than a kernel reload (during a firmware upgrade, for example) -- yet reboot is the first and most often successful advice most techs offer when clients cease connecting to wifi for inexplicable reasons.
A few months ago I went to my neighborhood waste management facility and saw that someone had thrown away a crap router -- a Belkin N300, if memory serves. I brought it home, flashed it with the most recent firmware from 2012, and gave it to a co-worker who needed a router with the warning that there was probably a reason its previous owner had thrown it away. That router, though, had a feature I had never seen before. I believe it was called "automatic self repair" or something similar. All it was, was just a scheduled reboot -- configured weekly by default, but that frequency could be increased to daily if needed. That feature is both horrible and glorious at the same time. It's like Belkin is openly admitting without a hint of shame, "Yeah, our firmware is buggy, but we automated reboots for you. You're welcome."
The reason BSA and I recommend Asus AC1900 routers is not only because they employ modern hardware with reasonably fast processing and ample non-volatile RAM, but also that their firmware is more stable out of the box. It was originally forked from Tomato[
*], an open-source project. The difference is, when bugs were found in Tomato, the open source community was able to participate in examining the code and assisting Jonathan Zarate in fixing them. Think of it as a peer review on a massive scale. And many of the components of Tomato were in production in Linux environments long before that -- route, busybox, iptables, ntp, and the list is too vast to enumerate. In other words, the beta testing on the open source components of the Asus firmware was completed years ago. On the other hand, makers of other consumer routers using closed source firmware have been advancing the same bugs from model to model, from generation to generation, for years.
