First off, someone mentioned living in "a rural area".
WiFi depends on your devices being able to connect to your router - so it has nothing to do with "being near cell towers" or anything like that.
Your router is your "signal tower" - and that's all that counts.
In fact, if you have lots of close neighbors, while you may end up being able to connect to their routers sometimes, their equipment is more likely to interfere with yours.
Other equipment, like microwave ovens and wireless phones, can also interfere.... and metal can block reception (even small metal objects, like a screen door, or even a metal bookend, can block the signal).
While most walls don't block the signal outright, thick walls can weaken it, and walls with metal power lines or pipes in them can actually block it, or drastically limit the range.
Better routers, repeaters or extenders, and even simply a detachable antenna that you can mount up high, might improve matters.
(And sometimes simply moving your router, or your device, a few feet will help.)
Also note that, because of how WiFi works, the weaker the signal, the
SLOWER your connection will be.
The other thing to know is that routers actually do have limitations.... several of them.... and performance varies wildly between different brands and models.
One common problem is that, when a device comes within range of your router, it gets assigned an IP address by the router, and added to the router's "contact list".
This contact list is a list of the addresses of all the devices your router has assigned addresses to... and the number of devices each router can keep track of is limited (some older routers were limited to five or ten devices).
Under normal circumstances, this list is managed based on time.... your router is configured so that, after a device hasn't been heard from for several hours, it gets dropped from the list.
And, if the list gets full, as new devices try to connect, the router simply drops the oldest devices from the list to make room for the new ones.... which is when you start to have problems.
Once a device is dropped from the list it no longer has a WiFi connection.
What happens is that, if you have too many devices trying to connect, your router doesn't have "enough slots", and so some devices get left out - or "bumped off".
Some devices accept this gracefully, while others do not.....
Likewise, some routers may become totally confused, or even crash, if it happens enough.
Unfortunately, between all those smart home devices, and cell phones that also do WiFi, it's not unusual for your router to have had twenty or thirty devices connected to it in the last day or so.
(So, when a few friends come over, their cell phones bump your music server, or your fancy new smart thermostat, or that new video doorbell, because the list was already full.)
There are several things you can do to prevent this from happening... but they all amount to "managing your devices".
For one thing, most routers allow you to configure important devices with "permanent addresses" - which don't get bumped.
For another, you can shut off WiFi access on devices that don't really need it.
(And you can assign passwords and set up security so that everyone who walks into your living room doesn't get assigned a connection.)
And, of course, you can buy a more powerful router than can keep track of more devices at once.
This is one of the reasons why resetting your router will often allow something like your XMC-1 to connect.
Although, under normal circumstances, the list will eventually open up as devices "time out", resetting the router clears it all at once.
This wipes out all the stale entries.... and gives the device you're using a new opportunity to be at the head of the line and claim an address.
And, if your router has had a nervous breakdown and actually crashed, or just become a little bit shaky, a fresh restart will usually cure that as well.
(Some routers seem to work fine for months; others seem to bog down with heavy use, and to work better if you reset them every week or two.)
One way to improve matters, and also avoid or minimize bandwidth issues, is to divide your network.
Essentially, have one router that manages all those smart devices, and maybe your computer downloads....
And have an entirely separate router, or even a separate network altogether, for your video and audio servers and players.
Doing that isn't as complicated, or as expensive, as you might think (hardware and network cables have gotten very cheap lately)..... but it still takes a bit of thought.
For example, when you understand how switches work, it's not especially complicated to make sure that you arrange your network so that the movie you're
watching can go directly from your video server to your TV...
WITHOUT sharing a network link with that huge file you're downloading from the Internet.
(Frequently it's just a matter of keeping track of what gets plugged into what else.)
Whether this makes sense, and is worth the bother, depends on your network - and how you use it.
(It also depends on your equipment. For example, my cable modem includes a router and switch that are actually quite speedy, so I can run everything through it with no problems.
However, if I had a slow DSL router instead, I might find that connecting my video server and my TV both to it didn't work very well; and simply adding a $20 switch and moving a
few connections might be a huge improvement.)
