Lost my last client in Lisbon because of a $4 hostel wifi router

I was in Lisbon last month, week three of a six week stint, and I had a client call at 7am my time because they were in Sydney. The hostel wifi was fine for email but the second I hopped on a video call it just died. I checked the router and it was this cheap $4 thing from a bargain bin with 30 people fighting over it. I tried using my phone as a hotspot but the local SIM data ran out after like 40 minutes. I ended up walking to a cafe at 6:30am that didn't open until 8, so I sat on the curb outside and did the call on 4 bars of shaky LTE. They could hear me but my screen share kept freezing, and the client said, "maybe we try next quarter" which in client speak means never. What saved me after that was asking the hostel owner for a wired port and buying a $12 ethernet cable from a shop near Rossio. No one tells you that a cable beats a router in a crowded building every single time. I'm curious, has anyone here ever lost real money because of bad lodging wifi, and did you find a fix that actually worked?