Be Excellent To Each Other

Morning all,
We recently changed to Talk Talk for our fibre broadband but the router doesn't seem to be all that stable. Every so often the connection drops for a couple of seconds which means things like our Chromecast start displaying the message "cannot connect to network", or iPlayer drops back to the logo if we're watching something. We bought a powerline extender to go in Darwin's room for his camera, and that works perfectly now with no dropouts, so we don't think it's the actual internet connection, more the router. Anyway, is there a better router we can buy to replace the default one from Talk Talk?

It would need to power 2 chromecasts, 3 nest cameras, a smartbulb hub, and various phones, tablets and a computer across a small flat. The router is plugged directly into the master socket, but seems to struggle to reach through into our bedroom which is approximately 20 feet away through a couple of doors. We also struggle to sometimes get the chromecast to connect even from the front room however (6 feet away) and it's as though it knows it's on the network (because it pops up in the cast list) but when you press Cast it just doesn't respond.

So, any ideas on a decent router to keep our devices connected? We don't need any fancy features on it like port forwarding or management of traffic and sites and firewalls and filters, but it should be able to keep a decent signal and support all our devices.

Any suggestions please anyone?

Its been a long time since I've used anything other than the default one that came with the service - last one was a BT Homehub 3 I think (which I've still got and you can have it for the postage if you want it) -and the new one is just the newer model of it

Perhaps it’s faulty and getting TT to replace it first would be a decent option?

Thank you both. I still have the old sky router in the garage so I’ll put that back up and see what happens and see if the network becomes more reliable. If it does then we’re either ok or I can look at asking talk talk to replace it, and then if that still fails then yes please zaphod I may take you up on that offer.

Appreciate the help, and sorry for not replying sooner.

IIRC sky routers have the broadband account password baked in, so you may not be able to use it.

You could flash it, but it’s more faff innit