Wi-Fi routers aren’t the most exciting subject, but paying an extra $10 to $15 a month to rent one can add up quickly. With 71% of Americans choosing to rent their routers from their internet service provider, most of us are spending hundreds of dollars a year instead of making a one-time purchase. Your router is the gateway to the internet and affects every aspect of your online life.
“The router is the heart of your home network,” said Gianmarco Chumbe, CNET’s lab engineer who leads router testing. “Just like the heart pumps oxygen and nutrients everywhere it’s needed, your router pumps data to all of your devices. And just as a bad heart can affect your whole health, a bad router can ruin the internet experience in your home.”
Most of us know the feeling. According to a new CNET survey, 86% of Americans experience Wi-Fi drops at some point, and 19% say drops happen always, daily or frequently.
If you’ve spent any time looking at routers over the past two years, you’ve probably seen a lot about Wi-Fi 7. As always with tech products, there’s a lot of jargon to wade through, and it’s hard to tell what’s marketing and what will actually improve your internet experience. Is Wi-Fi 7 really that much better than the Wi-Fi 5, 6 and 6E generations of routers?
Key Takeaways
- During testing, Wi-Fi 7 tri-band routers were faster than previous generations at every distance and on every frequency band.
- Our test data shows that a tri-band Wi-Fi 7 router offers substantial performance gains and is a better value than a dual-band (even though dual-band is cheaper).
- Wi-Fi 7 routers are more expensive, but prices are dropping compared to a few years ago — making it a worthwhile investment now.
- Be sure to check the specs. If it says dual-band Wi-Fi 7 router, keep shopping. Only tri-band Wi-Fi 7s are strong performers.
- Wi-Fi 7 routers help future-proof against Americans’ rapid thirst for more Wi-Fi bandwidth.
- Due to its price and performance, TP-Link-branded routers dominated our testing and best list rankings.
- You can get a fast Wi-Fi 7 router for around $175.
Throughput: Wi-Fi 7 routers really are faster
Are Wi-Fi 7 routers faster than previous generations? The short answer is yes. Wi-Fi 7 routers recorded the highest total throughput scores by far: 3,169Mbps across all three bands combined, compared to 1,309 Mbps for Wi-Fi 6E routers.
That wasn’t entirely surprising — the buzz around Wi-Fi 7 has been focused on the addition of the ultrawide 6GHz band — but it was eye-opening to see that mirrored so starkly in our test results. Wi-Fi 6E supports the 6GHz band, too, but Wi-Fi 7 is still miles ahead in speed. Why such a large gap in performance?
“Wi-Fi 7 introduces several key upgrades that set it apart from tri-band Wi-Fi 6E routers,” David Coleman, director of wireless networking at Extreme Networks, told me in an email. “For example, Wi-Fi 7 supports 320MHz-wide channels — double the size of the widest channels in Wi-Fi 6E — meaning it can deliver much higher data rates.”
Think of it like a highway: Wi-Fi 7 routers have twice as many lanes for traffic to flow through as Wi-Fi 6E routers. They also have a feature called Multi-Link Operation, which allows devices to use multiple bands simultaneously and 4K-QAM (Quadrature Amplitude Modulation), which translates digital information into symbols for wireless transmission. Coleman told me this can boost transmission efficiency by up to 20% compared to Wi-Fi 6E. You never know how these back-of-the-box features are going to translate in a real-world environment, but in Wi-Fi 7’s case, it far exceeded my expectations.
In addition to total throughput scores, Wi-Fi 7 routers also outperformed previous generations by maintaining a strong signal even at longer distances. The 15 Wi-Fi 7 routers we tested averaged 515 Mbps at 50 feet across all three bands — well above the 383 Mbps of the Wi-Fi 6 routers we tested. Part of those higher throughput rates is the addition of the 6GHz band, but Wi-Fi 7 routers still outperformed Wi-Fi 6E significantly across the board.
In 2026, we are giving lab awards to the routers that are the very best at one thing. When we curate our best list or editor’s choice awards, we take price and features into consideration. To earn a CNET Lab Award, though, we only look at one metric. In this case, the routers that tested best for throughput (speed) and received a 2026 Lab Award are:
To see how we ranked routers based on price, features and performance, check out CNET’s Best Wi-Fi Routers, Best Wi-Fi 7 Routers, and Best Mesh Routers.
Jitter and packet loss weren’t affected as much by Wi-Fi standard
Wi-Fi 7 routers didn’t perform significantly better in our secondary metrics, jitter and packet loss. In general, we look for a jitter score under 1 millisecond when evaluating Wi-Fi routers. There were a few exceptions — the Netgear Nighthawk RS100 clocked 2.83ms on the 5GHz band — but almost every router we’ve tested has come back comfortably under this threshold.
Packet loss was a slightly different story. We generally look for packet loss scores under 1%, but no Wi-Fi standard reached this overall on 5GHz. Because packet loss is such an important metric for applications like online gaming, it might be worth manually switching to 2.4 or 6GHz, if available, for these activities.
Most dual-band Wi-Fi 7 routers aren’t worth it
Router companies are savvy marketers, and they know that for a lot of us, our router research ends once we see the Wi-Fi standard. Aiming to capitalize on the Wi-Fi 7 hype, several brands have started releasing “dual-band” Wi-Fi 7 routers. That means it’s missing the single most important aspect of Wi-Fi 7: Access to the ultrawide 6GHz band.
The two cheapest Wi-Fi 7 routers we tested — TP-Link’s Deco BE5000 and Deco BE3600 — both cost $100 right now, but it’s what’s called “dual-band” in the router world, which means it’ll only get you on the 2.4 and 5GHz bands.
I won’t go as far as to say dual-band Wi-Fi 7 routers are entirely a marketing gimmick — it typically still includes nifty Wi-Fi 7 features like MLO and 4K-QAM modulation — but it’s a little like buying a new gaming console and using your old controllers. You’ll still get some benefits, but if you’re already investing, isn’t it worth getting the full suite of upgrades?
This point jumped out at me when I plotted each router’s total throughput score along with its current selling price in the chart below. The upper right quadrant is entirely tri-band Wi-Fi 7 routers, meaning it can use all three bands, including the 6GHz band.
The Netgear NightHawk RS700S (upper right quadrant in green) stood out here in particular with a total throughput score of 4,346 Mbps: 92 Mbps on 2.4 GHz, 1,586 Mbps on 5 GHz and an eye-popping 2,668 Mbps on 6 GHz. In addition to the fastest Wi-Fi 7 router we tested, Netgear also had the fastest mesh system. Its Orbi 970 (upper right quadrant in green) is technically a quad-band router, as it uses four distinct bands simultaneously by adding a dedicated 5GHz band to allow the main router and its satellites to communicate.
In the chart above, you can see the gray and purple colored dots clustered together. Those are the dual-band Wi-Fi 7 routers and Wi-Fi 6 routers. The dual-band Wi-Fi 7 routers are virtually indistinguishable from Wi-Fi 6, and in a couple of cases, dual-banded Wi-Fi 7 was actually more expensive and had worse throughput scores.
As a group, the dual-band Wi-Fi 7 routers did worse than the Wi-Fi 6E routers (yellow). With Wi-Fi 6E, you will have access to the 6GHz band, but it doesn’t come with the other valuable Wi-Fi 7 features like MLO and 4K-QAM. I would much rather pay $127 for the fastest Wi-Fi 6E router in our tests, such as the TP-Link Archer AXE75, than shell out for a dual-band router just because it has a Wi-Fi 7 label on the box. Even the fastest Wi-Fi 6 router, the TP-Link Deco X55 Pro, outperformed all but two of the dual-band Wi-Fi 7 routers at a fraction of the price.
There’s more to routers than raw throughput, but the dual-band Wi-Fi 7 routers didn’t distinguish themselves in our jitter, packet loss or signal strength tests, either. Bottom line: If you see “dual-band” next to Wi-Fi 7 in a router description, our test data reveals it’s not a good purchase.
Wi-Fi 7 routers are more expensive. Is the cost worth the value?
When Wi-Fi 7 routers first hit the shelves a couple of years ago, the cost was around $1,000. Prices have come down a lot since then, with a handful available for under $100, though most of those are dual-band routers.
But on the whole, you’ll still pay a premium for Wi-Fi 7. Of the 34 routers we tested last year, Wi-Fi 7 routers had an average cost of $293, compared to $124 for Wi-Fi 6E, $178 for Wi-Fi 6 and $53 for Wi-Fi 5. Some higher-end Wi-Fi 7 offerings skew those numbers, but there still aren’t a lot of truly “budget” Wi-Fi 7 routers available.
To find out how much bang for your buck you’re really getting, we divided each router’s price by its throughput score to give us a “price per Mbps” metric. (We’ve been using this equation for years at CNET to compare internet plans.) The results show that there’s still significant value across all Wi-Fi standards.
CNET’s pick for the best overall Wi-Fi router, the TP-Link Archer BE550, topped the rankings when looking at price and value. At $200, it’s not exactly cheap, but it delivered a combined throughput of 3,269 Mbps across all three bands in our testing: 127 Mbps on 2.4 GHz, 1,259 Mbps on 5 GHz and 1,882 Mbps on 6 GHz. That was significantly faster than several routers that cost more than twice as much.
If there’s one overarching takeaway from the price-per-Mbps analysis, it’s that it’s time to leave Wi-Fi 6 routers behind. If you buy any new devices over the life of the router, Wi-Fi 6 won’t be able to unlock its full potential. While cheaper, there’s a steep enough drop in performance that the savings are no longer worth it.
There are a few exceptions. TP-Link’s Deco X55 Pro and Archer AX21 are both great value picks — the AX21 happens to be the router I use myself — but you’re much more likely to overpay than you are with Wi-Fi 6E or 7.
You’ll need Wi-Fi 7 devices for Wi-Fi 7 speeds
One of the main things to consider before buying a Wi-Fi 7 router is whether you have the devices to take advantage of it. Only Wi-Fi 7-capable devices will be able to use those fancy features like MLO, 4K-QAM and, most importantly, the 6GHz frequency.
If you’ve bought a new device in the past year, there’s a good chance it’s Wi-Fi 7-enabled. The latest Google Pixel 8 and 9 Series both have Wi-Fi 7, as do the latest Microsoft Surface laptops.
In other cases, the Wi-Fi 7 question has a fuzzier answer. The iPhone 16 and 17 series are technically Wi-Fi 7 devices, but only support a maximum of 160MHz channels — not the ultrawide 320MHz that seriously boosted speeds over Wi-Fi 6E.
The bottom line
Most people probably don’t need to spend more than $200 on a standalone Wi-Fi router — the good news is our test data shows you don’t have to. The TP-Link Archer BE550 costs $200 and had the best price-per-Mbps score of any router. Another TP-Link, the Archer AXE75, was the fastest Wi-Fi 6E router overall and is currently selling for $113.
Aside from cost, though, Wi-Fi 7 is the future. (Wi-Fi 8 is coming, but not until 2028.) Wi-Fi 7 routers have been around for more than two years, and up until now, my advice has been not to upgrade to one yet. With a price tag of $600, the Netgear NightHawk RS700S performed astonishingly well in our tests, but most people don’t have anywhere near the number of devices that would require that kind of horsepower for that price.
I’m starting to reconsider. Two things have happened that changed my mind: Wi-Fi 7 routers have come down in price significantly, and we’re consuming more bandwidth than ever. A recent report from the broadband analytics company OpenVault found that the average American household used 767GB per month in the last quarter of 2025, which was 69GB higher than the year before.
“It’s just mind-boggling, because that was the average usage 12 to 15 years ago,” OpenVault CEO Mark Trudeau told me of that 69GB jump. “It’s not going to be much longer before we’ve crossed the terabyte threshold.”
Wi-Fi 6 routers aren’t ready for that future. I question whether Wi-Fi 6E routers are, either. After spending months with our CNET Labs testing data, Wi-Fi 7 is the only standard I feel confident will keep up with your internet needs a decade from now. (Just stay away from the dual-bands.) And with good tri-band Wi-Fi 7 routers available for less than $200, it makes sense to spend a little more to future-proof your network.
How we measured router performance
We’ve tested more than 30 Wi-Fi routers at CNET Labs over the past year, and all of them have gone through the same evaluation process. You can read more about how we test Wi-Fi routers, but these are the key metrics we focus on:
- Throughput: This is the most important data we collect on routers. Throughput measures the actual amount of data that a router can transmit over a given period of time. It’s typically measured in Megabits per second (Mbps) — the same unit you’ll see when shopping for internet plans. Looking at throughput removes the ISP from the equation and spotlights exactly how much traffic a router can handle at once. Throughput measurements are taken at three different distances from the router: 7 feet, 25 feet and 50 feet.
- Jitter: Jitter measures the variations in latency, or the time it takes for data to arrive at its destination. When you’re in a video meeting, and there’s a delay in audio or someone’s video freezes, jitter is the reason.
- Packet loss: This metric measures the percentage of packets that failed to reach their destination. Think of it like sending a package. Jitter tells us the variations in time that it took the package to arrive; packet loss tells us how often the package failed to arrive at all.
- Signal strength: This test shows how well each Wi-Fi router broadcasts its signal while dealing with interference from walls and other electronics in your home. We taped targets at 61 locations around CNET’s 15,000-square-foot testing facility and carted a laptop around to measure the signal at each one.
- Wi-Fi bands: Our CNET Labs engineers took each of the above measurements on every Wi-Fi band available on each router, for Wi-Fi 5 and 6 routers, which were limited to the 2.4 and 5GHz bands. On newer Wi-Fi 6E and 7 routers, we also measured each data point on the 6GHz band.
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