Problems with Linksys EA8300

[Ant!]

Hi,
We run in our small company (which has in the same building two offices, in the 2nd and 4th floor) the following network:
1. Our internet provider's modem is connected to a Linksys EA8300 which spans the wifi for the 2nd floor office, and some devices use the Ethernet connections of it. The EA8300 acts as router.
2. An Ethernet cable runs from the EA8300 (2nd floor) to the 4th floor office to and plugs into a Linksys E1200v2 router in bridge mode and with wifi disabled. Some devices connect to its Ethernet connectors, and an Ethernet cable connects to a UniFi AP AC Lite wifi access point. This UniFi access point spans the wifi in the 4th floor, with a different SSID then the wifi in the 2nd floor.
This works most of the time, but every 1-2 months the internet connection makes problems. It would cut out, some connections fail, some work. It affects all devices (Windows, Mac, Linux, mobile phones,...) and on both floors, so it cannot be a pure wifi problem, I assume the EA8300 makes problems.
I contacted already our ISP, they see no problem on their end until the modem. Even when we have this problem, if I get a connection to a speedtest site, it shows the internet speed is fine.
Last time I did a complete reset of the EA8300, this helped for some weeks. A pure restart was not helping. Currently the router shows 22 devices, is this just too much for this home router? The firmware is all up to date. I am always able to connect to the router's interface, the wifi is stable.
Do you have ideas what we could do to fix it? Would a more powerful router be the only solution or something else what could be fixed?

 

[Internet Man]

You would likely benefit greatly from upgrading your networking hardware. Needing to reboot a device can be a sign of bad quality. I'd get a wired router like an EdgeRouter and reconfigure the EA8300 as an access point. Have you put any effort into splitting up the wireless clients across the three bands provided by the EA8300? This would reduce interference.

Get the Linksys E1200 out of the system. You seem to be using it as a switch, but it only supports 10/100 fast ethernet. A simple gigabit switch would be very cheap.

 

[Ant!]

Thanks, that's what I was thinking.

And yes, the E1200 is used as a switch only since the Unify access point does not have Ethernet ports (I need at least one for our VOIP system).

Looking at the Unify EdgeRouters, which do you think would fit for our size (lets say 30 devices, 10 users most of the time using the network).
Another idea: Since we are a NGO, we get through Techsoup (a Canadian organization managing tech donations to NGOs) a Cisco C891F-K9 for CAD 200 (the C881-K9 for CAD 105 is currently sold out...), which seems heavily discounted. Would this make sense? While I have some experience with home routers (Asus, Liksys, also installing open source systems like Tomato and Gargoyle), business style routers seem to be a different class, was surprised how different the installation of the Unify access point was (not more complicated, just very different). We do not really need advanced functions like VPN, just a reliable connection.

 

[coxhaus]

The Cisco small business routers like the RV340 work well for me. They hum along 24/7 with no problems or restarts. Cisco also has wireless APs to go along with the router. The Cisco wireless APs are pretty easy to configure and they include their own controller. You set one up and the others auto configure with one point setup.