Hi, PC techies. I'm looking for ideas to replace my loathsome comcast gateway [View all]

I've been in my current house for eight and a half years and I'm on my fourth modem/gateway from the cable wizards. The weekly hour plus outages and demands to change gateway hardware three times in two years is getting old. I am hoping to mitigate at least their hardware swapping habits and save the cost of renting their stuff which is apparently incapable of what my $25 netgear router did 12 years ago known as firmware-over-the-air (FOTA).

What I'm looking for is a good AC capable (2.4 & 5 GHz) unit that will work with their gateway set in bridge mode. At least 1 and preferably 4 LAN ports (10/100/1000) and at least 1 WAN port (10/100/1000) are needed. The number of LAN ports doesn't matter as long as I get at least 1 as I have a 24 port switch.

Wall mountable would be nice.
I've never used the USB ports for anything, so they would also fall in the nice-to-have category.

Subsequent to adding the router, I plan to replace the gateway with a modem which I'll be looking to buy next. Maybe I'm crazy but the 1 step at a time plan seems reasonable.

I'm hoping to keep the cost for the router at $150 and cheaper would be even better.

Thanks for your thoughts.