Like all tech broadband is likely to need attention to keep it going, make it work as you need.

As seen in other threads I have work to do to make ours perform to the needs of the inhabitants.
Best place to start is basics to make sure all is as it should be.

Suppliers appear to be much of a muchness these days although I may be spoilt by being with Plusnet who are one of the least worst, maybe even good

Check your router is in the Master socket if you are on a landline. Ours wasn't thanks to the incompetent BT or Openreach type who first installed.
Resetting or more seriously turning the router off and on fixes a lot of problems.

Next level for me.
Check the device, PC, Pad, Phone is working well and up to date as that may affect performance.

Plusnet and others on the interweb advise me to check frequencies and channels in case being interfered with or other ?
Although from advice given on this very emporium this is highly unlikely I shall be trying as I am starting with basics and working through

I have been impressed with Zen in the UK both for business and home. I had Vodafone at home for a while as a legacy of originally being with Demon (who were superb in their original form, but now no longer exist - thanks to AT&T and then Vodafone buying them). I have 2 broadband connections at home in the UK (now both with Zen) and one with Zen and a second with Vodafone at work (although Vodafone will not be a supplier for much longer). In both cases the connections are 'concatenated' / allocated to certain services by the network controller. At home I see about 60 MB/s on both, but at work it is significantly less (but of the two, Zen is the faster and more reliable connection) due to the distance from the cabinet / exchange.

In Germany I use Telekom for both broadband (60 Mb/s down and ca 20 Mb/s up) and telephones (originally both over ISDN, but the telephone network is now the Magneta IP telephony system and so there is an extra box attached to the router plus an IP to ISDN converter so the ISDN handsets still work to accommode that). I have no complaints at all and the contract also integrates my German mobile phone and Ina's.

In Germany I use a Telekom router as that is simplest to integrate the IP telephony with, but the WiFi is disabled and its only connection is to a firewall device / VPN gateway. After that the network is mainly wired, but has 3 WAPs for laptops and tablets. It is managed by a Unifi network controller (not 'cloud' connected).

In the UK I use a mix of DrayTek modems and DrayTek and FritzBox routers (in bridge mode, and again without WiFI) to connect the incoming broadband to a firewall device / VPN gateway. Again, most of the networks are then wired, but with WAPs for mobile devices (except at work where WiFi is only implemented for very specific purposes on an isolated network). At home in the UK the network is managed by a Unifi controller (again not 'cloud' connected).

With respect to checking the device, their are two aspects, firstly that it has the most recent and up to date software to support wifi and hard wired connection (if used), and is compatible with the ADSL router capabilities. If the router is out of the arc then you will certainly not get the benefit of the most recent wifi support, for example the newest Apple iPads support "802.11ax Wi‑Fi 6; simultaneous dual band (2.4GHz and 5GHz); HT80 with MIMO Bluetooth 5.0 technology"

Checking channels is not as unimportant as some think, a wifi channel has a particular frequency (it is like a radio frequency). If you live in a densely populated area, a city flat or even for that matter an urban estate then being on the same channel as nearby neighbours can be an issue. How much of an issue will depend on the signal strength of you neighbours wifi network(s) and the distance you are from them. It is not uncommon for people to extend their wifi in their properties using wifi repeaters, I do it for several reasons, to improve wifi signal at the far end of the house and to enable a reasonable wifi when out in the garden, I can walk 50' from our house and still be connected to our network. So if we had close neighbours on the same channel the cross channel interference could occur, especially when I was in a weaker signal location in my property. 

Personally if you are going to use a network for streaming music, videos, catchup TV etc (especially if hi-res, whether music or video/TV) then at present I would avoid doing so with a wifi based device if quality and consistency are of importance. I avoid this by having the key heavy use devices connected by ethernet directly to the ADSL router via a switch in the roof, . Another thing to remember is that your network is directly impacted by how many are simultaneously connected to it, think of your Router as a Water Tank and the devices as taps the, the more taps connected and open then the water flow at each device will slow and become a trickle.

Apart from the number of devices connected at any one time, one device can have a huge impact, when I worked at an Apple store in technical support it never failed to amuse me when a customer came if complaining that there Mac was slow, this was usually either Email or the Web browser they were suing or both. The email would be caused by the customer having 10s of thousands of emails in their Inbox, it did not matter whether they had been read or not, the Email application in the background would be merrily trying to check every email header against the physical email box on the server to update it, and how does it do this, by the internet and wifi, solution clear out your inbox regularly and only open large email folders when you are doing something. The web browser issue is the person who just opens tab after tab, in recent years this has become more of an issue, this is because web page content can and often does contain dynamic content, adverts that change or have video content, pages that change with time, just because you may be looking at the open tab do not assume the others are not being updated in the background and using wifi and broadband resources, they will be. I never forgot a customer a few years ago who came in complaining her MacBook Pro was broken and kept freezing, and was rubbish, after about 5 minutes of checking it over I noticed that she had Safari running and had over 200 tabs open. Strangely to the customers surprise when I closed 95% of them her computer suddenly started working normally and did not freeze. Remember these devices are running a multi-tasking operating systems and that is what they will do, multiple applications and within them.

I hope this helps, apologies if you already know this but it may be useful to others as well

👍definitely

In the email app, open the inbox, select ‘edit’ top right, then select ‘select all’ top left. You can now scroll down and deselect each email you want to keep in the inbox, having done that at the bottom are three actions you can apply to all selected, ‘mark’ ‘move’ ‘delete’ .

You may want to creat one or more folders to save some emails to, if not then you can just delete what you don’t need.

Hope that helps.

A while back I was setting up an item on the network and was offered connection to next door's network.
Seen it a few times since.
Can't get in as I don't know their password - but - can the offering be indicative of their network interfering with ours ?

Imagine a block of flats.  We'll say there are six flats per floor and it's twenty stories high.  Assuming 80% of tenants have broadband, which is a pretty conservative estimate I'd say, that means there would be 96 signals floating about, so seeing your neighbor's broadand installation when adding something to your network is not exactly mission critical.  I'm sort of semi-urban here, and looking at my phone (the PC is wired, so Wi-Fi is switched off) I can see between four and seven other networks.

macOS actually has a feature integrated to sort out which are the best channels for you.



To access it, hold the Option key and click the Wi-Fi icon on the menu bar at the top of your screen. Select “Open Wireless Diagnostics.”

Ignore the wizard that appears. Instead, click the Window menu and select Utilities.



Select the Wi-Fi Scan tab and click Scan Now. The “Best 2.4 GHz Channels” and “Best 5 GHz” Channels” fields will recommend the ideal Wi-Fi channels you should be using on your router.



SOURCE

Remember to use only channels 1, 6 and 11 as the others have overlap and these three are common defaults in most models of router. I find 11 to often be the most available, but as I said earlier most new routers have auto channel selection.

May the broadband gods be with you Mike.