In the past year we've had problems with the standard Verizon FiOS routers. We've had to get replacements twice already because they started rebooting themselves for no apparent reason and this third router seems to have a wireless problem, (signal is only good in the room as if only one antennae is working).
Would it be better to buy a router or should we continue using Verizon's standard ones that they replace for free? If it is better to buy a router, are there any around $100? I'm mostly concerned about stability and wireless because these issues take a couple days to get fixed, which is annoying, and only my computer is ever plugged into it.
I have no experience with those Routers, however, i did come across something similar with the ISP provided routers in my days. Here, the ISP forced updates on the router, and to disable it, you had to fiddle with the configuration a bit. Updates sometimes failed, and so it kept spamming it, making router reboot.
Another thing, that caused a lot of problems, was the bandwidth and connections pushed through it (household routers will not hold up to over 10 clients, especially if multiple people cannot configure their torrent clients not to use 200 connections per download)
Now, back to your scenario, my guess is that like many big evil ISPs they use some crappy router, what usually breaks down. (this is all speculation, no experience with them)
You can get a decent router under a 100$, heck, some of the 40$ ones will get the job done just fine. But to help you out further, some questions do need answering.
How many clients will be using the Internet at any given time?
Is wireless speed important to you, do you have devices that use 5 GHz wi-fi?
Do you plan on having a media server at some point?
Yeah, I called Verizon customer support and did everything possible to fix it to no avail. Getting a replacement next week. The routers they give are just poorly made, that's my guess.
At any given time, it's usually about three and may go up to six or seven.
The speed is important for streaming video using a Google Chromecast and an Xbox 360, but not so much for the laptops and phones which are used more often and generally for basic web browsing.
I would like to set one up sometime. Maybe get an external 1TB drive and set it up a Raspberry Pi with XBMC so our devices can play music and video on the wireless.
Now, we do still have our old Belkin wireless N router, which was very reliable, but the connection to our box downstairs is through coaxial cable and there is not port for it to go in.
See if you can get a separate modem, and get your own router