New knowledge means that renting web tools out of your web service supplier may present a smoother web expertise than shopping for your personal router.
A examine from Opensignal, carried out between January and March 2025, means that web customers renting tools from ISPs expertise higher community reliability and consistency than those that personal their tools.
The principle motive for that discrepancy? Community diagnostics.
ISPs usually embrace apps, buyer care groups or administration companies to make it simpler to diagnose community well being. Whereas you’ll be able to definitely run these diagnostics by yourself, Opensignal notes that this buyer care goes a good distance in sustaining dependable dwelling networks, preserving prospects glad and preserving them from switching ISPs down the highway.
Plus, many ISPs lease high-performing routers with the most recent Wi-Fi expertise. Frontier Fiber, for instance, leases a tri-band Eero Wi-Fi 7 router for a few of its fiber plans. That top-of-the-line router is designed to cut back community latency and help a number of gadgets hogging bandwidth.
Opensignal used two metrics to gauge buyer expertise with their web service: reliability and consistency.
Opensignal’s examine finds that customers renting web tools reported general greater reliability and consistency with dwelling Wi-Fi networks than customers who owned tools.
The reliability metric is the community’s skill to stability a number of gadgets sharing bandwidth directly (the heavier the bandwidth, the higher), with out noticeable lag, interruptions or slowdowns. The consistency metric assesses the community’s steady skill to carry out effectively throughout on a regular basis duties.
It’s additionally value noting that cable or DSL web customers sometimes buy their very own tools to avoid wasting prices, most likely as a result of DSL and cable ISPs don’t sometimes embrace free tools.
However, fiber web customers incessantly lease tools from their suppliers as a result of it’s usually included at no further value. The reliability of fiber web might have contributed to a greater general expertise, on this case. (Word: the Opensignal examine targeted solely on wired web companies. Fastened wi-fi companies, like what you’d get from a 5G or satellite tv for pc web supplier, weren’t included.)
Realizing whether or not to purchase or lease your router is situational and sometimes comes right down to your price range, how a lot web velocity you actually need and what out there choices you might have.
Whereas I usually encourage individuals to purchase their very own routers to save cash on their web invoice, it is best to spend money on that tools solely when it is sensible to take action.
For instance, broadband author and router skilled Joe Supan rented his router from Xfinity for six years, racking up almost $1,000 on high of his month-to-month invoice. As soon as he invested in his personal router, he observed boosted speeds and reliability, and saved on his month-to-month web invoice.
However, if you should use web tools free out of your ISP, you’ll lower your expenses and the headache of coping with your web tools. I’ve a free gateway system from AT&T, and it saves me loads of bother: Once I expertise a (uncommon) outage or slowdown, the AT&T app simply troubleshoots and fixes the problem with minimal influence or interruption to my day.
To that finish, it was no shock to me that AT&T acquired the best buyer satisfaction ranking within the Opensignal examine — it usually locations first in buyer satisfaction surveys.
Nonetheless, in the event you’re in a position to spend money on your personal, high-quality router and also you don’t thoughts tending to your own home community’s well being by yourself, you’ll save your self some cash by not renting tools and be taught some invaluable abilities about Wi-Fi troubleshooting within the course of.
