Internet access is a household essential, especially for those who work remotely. Depending on the speed, costs can add up quickly, but there’s always an opportunity to save. While it might seem convenient to use equipment offered by the provider, renting a router is an unnecessary expense, often adding hundreds of dollars a year to the service. Additionally, existing router owners may consider an upgrade to ensure they’re making the most of their plan. But choosing the right router can be a bit overwhelming. There’s a lot of jargon and specifications involved. How much speed and reach are required to cover every inch, anyway?
There are multipoint mesh routers, ones that support Wi-Fi 7 (the newest version) and Wi-Fi 6E routers that offer access to the ultrawide 6GHz band. The good news is, that we’ve done the work and have zeroed in on five key basics to help determine the ideal model.
You might not need a new router at all
Before spending any money, it’s a good idea to make sure that you get the most out of your existing router. Wi-Fi is finicky, and it doesn’t take much to disrupt those wireless signals, so if your connection seems slower than you need, it might not be your router’s fault.
There are many things you can do to help a router perform its best, most importantly, keeping it in an open space and off the floor. Stashing it away in a closet or on the back of a dusty shelf beneath your TV might help keep the wires at bay, but you’ll also end up blocking the Wi-Fi’s signal strength. In that case, swapping a new router into the same spot might not help at all.
Along with physical obstructions like furniture, keep an eye out for large electronics like appliances and televisions, as those might also interfere with the connection from a nearby router. Wi-Fi struggles to penetrate through water, so if you’ve got any large aquariums at home, consider positioning the router away from such things so they won’t block the signal.
For minor tweaks to your signal, try experimenting with the angles of your router’s antennas — straight up and down is best for horizontal coverage in a single-story home, but folding the antenna flat or at an angle can help direct the signal up or down to cover a basement or an upper floor. And if you just need an extra room’s worth of range or so from your router, you might get the required speed with a Wi-Fi range extender, which will cost you a lot less than buying a new router outright.
Lastly, it’s probably worth it to check with your internet provider to ensure you’re using its latest hardware. In many cases, if it has a newer modem or gateway device available, it’ll send it to you for free. And hey, speaking of your ISP…
Your ISP sets the speed limit
Keep in mind that it doesn’t matter how fast your router is — pulling data from the web is only as fast as the plan from your internet service provider allows. If you’re paying for download speeds of, say, 100Mbps, that’s as fast as your router will go when you’re browsing the web or streaming video. Period.
That’s a significant limitation these days. In our own top speed tests, we’re seeing a growing number of routers that can comfortably hit speeds of 1 gigabit per second or faster — but with the average fixed broadband speed in the US currently sitting at just over 250Mbps (or less, if your ISP throttles your connection), few of us can hope to surf the web that fast anytime soon.
That isn’t to say that fast routers aren’t worthwhile. For instance, top speeds are still achievable during local transfers — when using the router to pull files from one computer to another on your local network. Your ISP speeds don’t matter at all for such transfers because you’re not sending or receiving data beyond your local home network.
Upgrading to a faster, more powerful router can also help you get the most out of your home’s internet connection, especially when connecting at range. Be sure to keep an eye on our latest reviews as you shop around to get a good sense of the specific routers that might be the best fit for your home. We’re constantly testing new models and updating our best lists with new test data.
Speed ratings are basically bull
I’ve written about this before, but it bears repeating, The speed ratings you’ll see on the packaging and scrolling through router listings are close to meaningless.
I’m talking about figures like “AC1200” and “AX6000.” The letters there tell you what version of Wi-Fi the router supports — “AC” for Wi-Fi 5, or 802.11ac and “AX” for Wi-Fi 6, also known as 802.11ax. The numbers provide a rough sense of the combined top download speeds of each of the router’s bands — typically 2.4 and 5GHz, and perhaps a second 5GHz band if we’re talking about a triband router, or 6GHz with Wi-Fi 6E routers.
The problem is that you can only connect to one of those bands at a time. When you add their top speeds together, the result is a highly inflated figure that doesn’t represent the speeds you’ll experience. If it’s a triband mesh router that uses that third band as a dedicated connection between the router and its extenders, then that band’s speeds don’t directly apply to your device connections.
To make matters worse, those top speeds on the box are theoretical maximums derived from lab-based manufacturer tests that don’t take real-world factors like distance, physical obstructions, interference or network congestion into account. Even at close range, your actual connection will be a lot slower.
None of that stops manufacturers from using those speed ratings to describe how fast their products are. For instance, that hypothetical AX6000 router might claim to support speeds of up to 6,000 megabits per second — which is nonsense. A router is only as fast as its fastest band. Don’t be fooled.
Wi-Fi 7 is here, but Wi-Fi 6 is still fine for most people
Wi-Fi 7 is the newest, fastest version of Wi-Fi, but it’s currently overkill for most people. Wi-Fi 7 routers like Amazon’s Eero Max 7 ($600) and the Asus RT-BE96U ($550) have started rolling out over the past year, but they’re still far too expensive for me to recommend to most people.
Like Wi-Fi 6E routers, Wi-Fi 7 taps into exclusive bandwidth in the 6GHz band recently opened up for unlicensed use thanks to the Federal Communications Commission. Wi-Fi 7 doubles the channel size of the 6GHz band used by Wi-Fi 6E, increasing from 160MHz to 320MHz — kind of like a highway going for two to four lanes. A Wi-Fi 7 laptop could reach a “potential maximum” speeds of 5.8Gbps, which is far more than most internet providers even offer.
For now, Wi-Fi 6 routers are still the better choice for all but the most connected homes. Wi-Fi 6 is pretty well-entrenched at this point, and any phones, laptops and even peripheral devices, like gaming consoles and media streamers released over the past few years, are taking advantage of it. If you want devices like those to put Wi-Fi 6 to work in your home, you’ll need a Wi-Fi 6 router running your network.
The good news is that there are lots of Wi-Fi 6 routers to pick from, including many that probably cost a lot less than you might think. Wi-Fi 6 is backward-compatible, mind you, so a new Wi-Fi 6 router still works with existing, older-gen Wi-Fi devices. It just won’t do as much to speed them up, because those older devices don’t support the new features that make Wi-Fi 6 faster than before.
Wi-Fi 6E could still prove to be a difference maker in the world of wireless connections, particularly in large, dense environments where several users are connecting (think airports, malls and stadiums). Still, it’s more of an enterprise upgrade than a mainstream feature, so there’s no need to rush out and upgrade your home network.
Don’t forget about coverage
We tend to fixate on speeds when we talk about routers, but the truth is that there are really only two Wi-Fi speeds that matter in most cases: “fast enough” and “not fast enough.” After all, having a blazing-fast connection in the same room as the router is great, but it means little if you can’t get a strong signal when during a late-night Netflix binge in your bedroom on the other side of the house. That’s especially true these days, with lots of people still staying home and depending on their home networks more than ever before.
That’s why, for many people, the most meaningful move you can make for that home network is to upgrade from a stand-alone, single-point router to an expandable mesh system that uses multiple devices to spread a reliably speedy signal throughout your house. Mesh systems typically won’t hit top speeds that are quite as high as a single-point router, but they make up for it by delivering Wi-Fi that’s “fast enough” to all corners of your home.
Over the past several years, upgrading to mesh was expensive, with most options costing at least $300 or even $500. Then the pandemic hit, and mesh routers soared in popularity — which, in turn, led manufacturers to start cranking out lots of new options, many of which cost significantly less.
Keeping up to date with these systems is one of my top priorities on the Wi-Fi beat, so keep an eye on my running list of the best mesh systems I’ve tested for my latest recommendations.
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