A year with Mikrotik router
I use NextGenTel with fibre broadband connection as my home Internet provider. The connection line works fairly well with no interruptions. I have been using a Mikrotik router for nearly a year now and have experienced no single interruption. No hanging internet, no problems at all. I nearly forgot that it is here.
Why I love Mikrotik is the Router OS, a professional operating system with tons of configurability and fine tuning. You can tweak any aspect and configure a variety of services. For example VPNs with different protocols for connecting into the local home network is easy to configure using the Mikrotik documentation. Queues are a nice configuration feature to control and manage bandwidth given to devices in the local network. There is also quite advanced scripting that can be used to do many interesting things. I do not recommend Mikrotik to an average user, however, because Router OS has a professional interface with too many options and details: you need to understand what you are doing. Mikrotik is a Latvian company that makes a lot of professional carrier-grade equipment, all run the same OS.
The previous router provided by the NextGenTel was pure disaster. I in fact used two different units of the same marque: Inteno.
This shit router tended to hung up at least one or twice a week, leaving no connection. The NextGenTel support was useless, with the routine advice to reboot router. Rebooting helped indeed until the next hangup, maybe the next day. It is not a solution to fix bad hardware. It is so weird that they supply their users with this shit when the competition between providers is so intense. Many people would not figure out that it is the router that is so bad and will blame NextGenTel as a whole and switch to another provider. Shame, NextGenTel.
But if you subscribe for the home telephone line with NextGenTel, then you are out of luck because telephone is served by the Inteno router which also includes a SIP service via built in Asterisk server pre-configured by the provioder. The only solution is then to torture NextGenTel with service requests and replacing the router. (But, of course, a better alternative is to set up your own asterisk-based SIP VoIP server with trunks from any of the many available SIP providers; this will be much more flexible and cost-effective solution).