I know it's kind of a random question to ask for tech troubleshooting here but this is literally the only place on the entire internet that isn't infested with condescending tech-bros, so I'm doing it anyway.
I'm also about to fuckin' ramble, and networking terms go over my head, so anyone who's answering please talk to me like I have no idea what anything means.
Alright, so I have xfinity (fuck monopolies, fuck capitalism), and the internet frequently cuts out. I am told that before we had our own modem + router + extender setup (that is, not the one xfinity provided, but a modem and router and extender we bought ourselves) the internet did not cut out quite so much. I'm not entirely sure I buy it, but it's not like I can fix xfinity's trashfire infrastructure that they have literally no incentive to fix because they are the only actual choice in the area.
Internet very frequently lags enough to kill the enjoyment of whatever game I'm playing, and a couple times a month or so the internet in the whole house just dies. Sometimes rebooting the modem and router fixes it, sometimes it doesn't, sometimes - and this is the part that boggles me the most - the internet will work when you connect through the wifi extender, but NOT when you connect directly to the router's wifi... the same router that the extender is connected to. I assume this has something to do with IP addresses, but again, I don't really know how IP addresses work, how to change mine, or whatever. Frequently some sites / services will load but others won't. Lastly, apparently we are paying for more powerful internet than our modem supports, but I don't know if getting a more powerful modem will actually stop the internet from crashing so much, and since being alive costs so fucking much I don't want to blow like $200 or whatever on a more powerful modem if it's not actually going to fix anything.
Someone please help me; I am an internet-addicted fiend and nothing erodes my psyche more than when I'm about to finish the runback on this fuckin Zangief I finally figured out in a first to five set and then suddenly xfinity pulls the plug on the final round.
Anyway rambling complete... for now.
It SEEMS to be affecting all devices, wired or no. Next time an outage happens, I'll have to test it more directly. But our house is setup in such a way that two of our main areas of internet usage are in places that aren't reasonably accessible by ethernet, so wifi is the only real option.
We don't have an xfinity-provided modem currently, that's part of what I'm hoping to troubleshoot... we got rid of their modem to do our own setup, so we wouldn't have to pay for theirs indefinitely.