New Delhi, Oct. 1 -- For the last few months, my evenings had a familiar pattern: a video call would freeze right when someone was mid-sentence, the smart TV would buffer during the one episode I actually had time to watch and my handset would quietly drop from Wi-Fi to mobile data without even warning me. I kept blaming my broadband plan. It took an embarrassingly long time to realise the actual problem was sitting quietly in the corner of my living room, a five-year-old dual-band router that simply couldn't keep up with how many devices my home had accumulated. This is the story of why I finally replaced it, what changed once I did and what I'd tell anyone eyeing a router upgrade during the festival sale.

When I bought my old router, m...