That's quite unusual in my experience. Even most low end / lost cost routers are pretty damn reliable these days. In an office complex with more than a dozen competing networks I use wifi 8 hours a day and rarely have a blip. Have you by any chance being moving one of the same wifi devices between all the different places you've had problems? Another thing, which wouldn't explain all the different locations, is a problem with your electrical wiring / loading. For example I used to have a Dell ethernet switch that would reliably reboot itself whenever other devices it shared a power strip with were under a heavy load. I could actually force reboot it by starting a dd between the right combination of disks in a server. I guess that does technically qualify as out of band management.

fwiw, I own/sort-of-run an MSP/break-fix shop, and we see a lot of this sort of thing. People only ever call us when something's busted, so it distorts our perception of the reliability of technology, but we literally spend all day, every day troubleshooting technical issues.

For routers specifically, people are going to have a wide range of experiences depending on the brand (and sometimes model) they purchased. They all have their own quirks. D-Link tends to experience intermittent packet loss, Netgear has sudden intermittent loss of radio signal, ASUS routers just simply stop routing packets every few weeks or so. For off-the-shelf, we tend to see the fewest complaints from Linksys wireless devices, but their wired devices are pretty unreliable.

Engenius, which you'll see in a lot of commercial deployments, are over-priced and the radios in them just give up and go home after about a year or so.

This is one of my favorite soapboxes, so I gotta be careful not to get carried away, but I really sympathize with the GP upthread. Mail software, iOS, MacOS, Windows of course, networking, printers, phone systems, camera systems, databases, the whole kit & kaboodle is full of infuriating behavior and it keeps getting harder and harder to diagnose, since nobody believes in ugly things like log files or serviceable hardware anymore.

I'm currently in the process of selling my break-fix business, because it's an infinite suck-hole that's stupidly difficult to make money on, and moving full-time to software development where I can at least close a bug report once in a while.

I don't have any professional experience diagnosing problems like this, but I've managed more than a few large-ish home networks (many roommates, large family w/ a ton of devices, etc.) in sprawling houses with thick foundations all the way to signal-dense apartment buildings where 2.4GHz is all but useless.

I personally cannot believe how terrible consumer-grade WiFi has stayed. You'd think that some of these manufacturers would be upping their QC at some point: I've experienced all the random undiagnosable problems you've described where nothing short of rebooting the router fixes things, and only until things break again later. I currently own one of those fancy Netgear Nighthawk routers and after months of going through PCI-Express cards on my desktop machine where random packet loss made gaming impossible (but not on any other devices even in the same room), I finally gave up and bought a 100ft cable off of Monoprice and ran it over some doorframes with tape.

I see a lot of buzz around all this "pro-sumer" mesh network gear[1], but I haven't had the kind of sprawling living situation that justifies it yet. (Though I did just recommend that article to a coworker on a very large property, and he's hoping it fixes his many, many problems.)

> it keeps getting harder and harder to diagnose, since nobody believes in ugly things like log files or serviceable hardware anymore.

Hear hear. To OP's original point, I can't believe how much stuff simply doesn't work like it's supposed to. I always thought it was my high-tech demands for plugging together services/software that weren't necessarily built for each other (e.g. Google Music on a Roku, or Snapchat on an Android phone), but after going home last Thanksgiving, it's unbelievable to me how many mainline iOS scenarios are completely broken. Every conversation I had with relatives was "oh yeah, that's easy to fix...lemme see...wait, what?...that doesn't make any sense...google-fu...huh, I guess there's some random problems with this...let's try deleting/re-adding your account...okay, that didn't do anything...wtf..." Throw in some "you got your iCloud password wrong twice and now we're locked out, time to go through insane account recovery", and I was ready to move to the woods and give up technology forever.

> moving full-time to software development where I can at least close a bug report once in a while.

Hahaha, grass is greener, man. Be prepared to be not fixing A LOT more bugs. ;)

[1] http://thewirecutter.com/reviews/best-wi-fi-mesh-networking-...

Not a panacea but for me using exclusively 5 GHz fixed wifi once and for all.

To offer a contradictory piece of anecdata, I had to disable 5GHz to maintain a consistent wifi connection.

Isn't technology fun?

my co-worker has an apple wireless keyboard at work (BYOD). if he moves it more than two inches it will disconnect from his MBP (also BYOD). _very_ annoying when I need to type something for him...

I personally think someone has put an apple-curse on him, he blames it on cheap batteries.

Why you're not shocked?

Because he had "considerable problems" with his Apple products? Basically Apple release unfinished product and let users test it - and it shows in the software quality.

(Don't even ask about the quality of any of their "1.0" products - full of bugs every time, newest example is the touch bar.)