If you need a new router now, you can either get an affordable AC router as a stopgap before upgrading to Wi-Fi 6E down the line or grab an early Wi-Fi 6 router now.
If you can, I'd recommend waiting until when Wi-Fi 6E will be fully baked. Having both allows you to get the best connection no matter where you are in the house. Looking for the perfect gift? Previously, he was the editor-in-chief of Lifehacker and How-To Geek. IE 11 is not supported. For an optimal experience visit our site on another browser.
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Shopping How to buy your next TV, according to a tech expert. All of which is to say that it's probably still too early for most of us to get a new Wi-Fi 6 router and don't forget that you'll need a really, really fast internet connection in order to notice the difference in the first place. That said, if you're looking to make the upgrade now, or if you need a new wireless router and you want something future-proofed for the next generation of Wi-Fi devices, then go for the TP-Link Archer AX It basically aced our performance tests , delivering the fastest router transfer speeds we've ever recorded , plus excellent range and low latency.
It definitely isn't cheap even at that price, but if you can catch it on sale, it's a worthy way to upgrade your home network to a robust Wi-Fi 6 network. Read our list of the best gaming routers. It's nothing fancy, but it offered near flawless performance for small- to medium-size homes in our tests, and it's a cinch to setup and use thanks to TP-Link's Tether app. Best of all, when tested against other, similar routers from names like Asus and Netgear, the AX21 held its own with faster download speeds, better range, and low latency, too.
Add in a functional bandsteering mode that automatically steers you between the 2. With fast wireless speed, simple setup and helpful, easy-to-use app controls, Google Wifi was our top mesh router pick for the past three years. Its second-gen follow-up, Nest Wifi , is faster, more affordable and just as easy to set up and use. Plus, the range-extending Points double as Google Assistant smart speakers now.
That, coupled with a new design that comes in multiple colors, is aimed at getting you to keep these things out in the open, where they'll perform better.
It doesn't support Wi-Fi 6 and Nest's range-extending satellite devices don't have Ethernet ports, which means you can't wire them back to the Wi-Fi router , but Nest Wifi does add in a couple of current-gen upgrades, including support for new WPA3 security standards and also 4X4 MU-MIMO connections, which means that this mesh Wi-Fi router can provide faster top speeds to devices that use multiple Wi-Fi antennas.
All of that helps Nest's mesh router punch above its weight and outperform most other mesh routers with similar specs. Read our Nest Wifi review. It isn't as fully featured as systems like Nest Wifi, and the app controls you'll use to set everything up aren't nearly as slick -- but aside from that, the new, budget-friendly Netgear Orbi system stands out as a clear value pick in the mesh category. In fact, of those three systems, Netgear Orbi clocked in with the fastest average top speed at close range -- and when we put that range to the test with smart devices at the CNET Smart Home , it edged those two Wi-Fi systems out with a faster router speed once again.
I even like the new design, with clever contours on top that vent out heat in style. Read our Netgear Orbi review. With a second 5GHz band serving as a dedicated backhaul for system transmissions between the router and its satellites -- at full Wi-Fi 6 speeds, mind you -- the system managed to ace our performance tests. To be exact, the system returned average Wi-Fi speeds of Mbps when I spent a few days testing the speeds and signal strength in various rooms at my home, where I have a fiber internet plan of Mbps from my Internet service provider.
That's a near perfect result, and one that no other mesh system I've tested has been able to match. I think most will find better value with something less expensive -- and you've got a growing number of options to that effect hitting the market this year.
Still, if you're buying right now and you just want the best mesh performance money can buy, this is the system to get. Read our Netgear Orbi 6 review. For the money, you're getting just about everything you'd get with Netgear, including a multi-gig WAN port and a dedicated backhaul band to keep transmissions between the router and the satellite separate from your network traffic.
That puts it right in the sweet spot for a future-proofed mesh router that feels every bit the part of a high-end upgrade. If your home is large and you think you'd benefit from having a mesh with more than one extender, you might also consider Eero Pro 6 , another triband mesh router that supports Wi-Fi 6. Link aggregation used to be restricted to more expensive routers, so its presence in the AX50 is a huge bit of future-proofing if you think you might upgrade to network-based storage later on.
In contrast, less expensive routers are limited to much slower data transfers over USB 2. One reason a router like the AX50 performs better than other routers making similar claims relates to the processor and memory inside. Just as in a laptop, the processor and memory inside a router affect its overall performance. A dual-core Intel processor and MB of RAM power the AX50, and we found that those components were sufficient to keep four laptops and devices chugging along successfully in our performance tests.
Overall setup with TP-Link, either through the Tether smartphone app or the administration website, is quick. Parental controls, security, and performance are relatively easy to configure in the Tether smartphone app. Among the parental controls, it offers basics such as time limits, content filtering, and bedtime settings. If you want to prioritize functions like streaming over gaming or vice versa, QoS quality of service settings are also included and easy to adjust.
The Archer AX50 is priced squarely in what we consider the sweet spot. Saving a substantial amount of money by choosing a cheaper model means making a noticeable sacrifice in performance. And folks who need more capabilities have to spend a lot to get just a small jump in performance. TP-Link routers come with a two-year warranty, which is on a par with the coverage period for our other picks.
The AX50 has four non-removable antennas connected to the back panel, but they are articulated and adjustable. If that last sentence sounds like incoherent technobabble to you, the AX50 would be more than sufficient for your needs.
Like our top pick, the AX20 broadcasts a speedy Wi-Fi 6 network with good throughput, better-than-average range, and solid responsiveness low latency , but it drops a few niceties to reach a lower price. It was a bit slower on our long-range tests, it has a slower USB 2. However, if you just need speedy Wi-Fi access in your home, the AX20 still delivers.
On the other hand, the AX20 was less responsive than the AX50 when multiple devices were active, so a busy household might notice more lag on the AX20 than a home with fewer devices.
Instead, it has basic firewall security and no monitoring. But the AX20 is a decent substitute and a good value if our main pick is out of stock, and it also outperforms our budget pick, the Archer A7, on all factors. It can serve a strong, responsive Wi-Fi 6 signal to all corners of an average home, and it has more ports for wired devices such as a desktop PC, a media streaming box, a gaming console, and NAS devices. In our tests, it outperformed the pack in speed and latency, and it includes upgrades that will keep it relevant in a rapidly changing smart home.
If you need or like to tweak your network settings for specific cases such as gaming or content streaming, or because you need to give critical devices priority over others, the RT-AX88U offers lots of switches and sliders to change those settings in its administration console. The AX88U also comes with subscription-free AiProtection Pro network protection, which can help manage network traffic to prioritize voice and video communications over gaming, among other options that try to keep the most important things from slowing down.
More expensive home routers exist, but the next step up from here is practically a commercial-grade router, and in that realm you get features that most people would never touch and might need an IT degree to understand.
Although the top picks in this guide outperformed the Archer A7 overall in throughput, range, and responsiveness, the Archer A7 held its own and surpassed a few other routers costing double the price or more. It had excellent short-range throughput speeds in our tests, doing better than five of the other routers in this guide. But its long-distance throughput, at our garage testing site 50 feet away, was quite a bit slower than that of our pick and runner-up, which is why we recommend the A7 only for smaller living spaces.
When we subjected all our routers to a busy network to test delays and lag, the Archer A7 landed solidly in the middle of the pack. Even though its latency scores were often three times those of our other picks, the A7 was still much better than some routers costing twice or thrice as much. If your household really hammers your Wi-Fi network—lots of video calling, streaming, and browsing all at once—spending more on the AX50 or AX20 will make a bigger difference.
Firmware updates help keep the two-year-old Archer A7 current. For example, Wirecutter managing editor Annam Swanson experienced dropped connections on her A7. In this case we have a couple of alternatives.
The Archer AX90 is really, really big, with eight permanently attached antennas. The AX90 also has a 2. It has a 2. It shares many features with the RT-AX88U, including the ability to customize Wi-Fi radio settings, AiMesh compatibility, and it includes updated security and advanced parental controls AiProtection Pro for the life of the router.
The AX86U also earned top marks on our latency test and it has a quad-core processor and 1 GB of RAM, which means it can still handle lots of devices and traffic—just in a smaller home or office than the AX88U could support. Although its rack-mounted models are decidedly overkill for most homes, we were intrigued by the recent introduction of the UniFi Dream Machine UDM , which seems tailor-made for homes and small businesses.
The UDM has a built-in A couple of nice unique features: The power supply is built in no wall-wart AC adapter necessary , and the UDM has an internal fan to quell overheating. In particular, the UDM was less responsive on a vital test—long-distance latency on a busy network—than the Asus. In an addendum to our mesh-networking guide , we found that a Ubiquiti setup with wired UAP access points outperformed a top mesh-networking kit in wireless-only mode.
Testing for most Wi-Fi router reviews consists mostly of connecting a single device to Wi-Fi at various distances, trying to get the biggest throughput number possible, and declaring the router with the biggest number and the best range the winner, at least in terms of raw performance. The problem with this method is that it assumes that a big number for one connected device divides evenly into bigger numbers for all connected devices.
The purpose of our testing was not to choose a router that was slightly faster than another; it was to see which routers could deliver consistently strong performance without encountering major issues in real-world conditions.
Instead of running just a single speed test, we used four laptops at different distances from the router in a 2,square-foot, two-story suburban home to simulate the real-world activity of a busy home network. Because these tests simulated real-world traffic, they did a better job of modeling real-world performance compared with a tool like iPerf , an artificial testing utility that moves data from one machine to another as fast as possible.
We used a mix of For example, some recent Windows laptops as well as top-of-the-line phones such as the iPhone 11 and Samsung Galaxy S20 have Wi-Fi 6 wireless radios, while budget smartphones, older laptops, or smart speakers are likely to be on Wi-Fi 5.
We ran all these tests at the same time for a full five minutes to simulate a realistic extra-busy time on a home network. We ran each test six times, and we then averaged the results to smooth out spikes.
We tested throughput using a real HTTP download, the same protocol you use to view websites and download files, to better expose differences in CPU speed and general routing performance. We characterized speed by looking at the combination of performance when downloading a large file at short and long range.
The majority of the routers were able to top Mbps at close distances, with some of the best-performing routers, like the Asus RT-AX88U, reaching over Mbps. Your internet service plan acts as a speed limit on your connection to the internet. Folks on a gigabit plan a 1, Mbps connection are more likely to be able to max out their connection speeds using any of the top routers. Although that sort of speed might work for HD web videos one at a time or simple browsing, according to Netflix 25 Mbps is the minimum comfortable throughput threshold for 4K video.
Latency refers to the time you spend between clicking on a link and waiting for the next web page, streaming video, or file download to come through. We ran this test concurrently on two laptops while other laptops were downloading files and simulating a 4K video stream, further stressing the Wi-Fi network. During our multi-client latency testing, we looked at how well a router performed typically the median as well as how poorly it did in its worst moments the 75th-, 90th-, 95th-, and 99th-percentile results.
This procedure allowed us to determine how frequently and how much the experience may frustrate you. The routers near the bottom of the middle, like the Netgear RAX40 and Ubiquiti UniFi Dream Machine still performed admirably, but started to show increased latency they petered out quicker than the leaders. Our stacked median latency chart below shows the typical latency for every computer on our test network at once, offering some idea of how the whole network will usually perform when you have multiple devices making requests at the same time.
Again, the Asus RT-AX88U was able to speedily serve each client simultaneously, with a minimal wait between each request. Consistently having to wait a few seconds for something to happen is the definition of slow internet.
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