WiFi Router: It’s important to know that a wireless router is not the same as a cable modem. The type you choose will depend on the size of your home - smaller places can get away with a single router, larger ones could use the extra support of a mesh network - but there’s no wrong answer.Ĭable Modem vs. Mesh wireless routers are newer instead of one router, they typically come in packs of two or three, which you place in different parts of your home to create a larger, stronger network. Point-to-point routers are traditional: they have antennas sticking up from the back, and stay connected in a fixed point in your home.
Mesh or Point-To-Point: Modern wireless routers come in two variants: point to point, or mesh. It’s far better than logging into your router and navigating around an old web interface. All of the routers in our guide allow you to change key settings - your password, enabling or disabling a firewall, blocking certain devices from accessing the internet - via an app on your smartphone (iOS and Android). long, mixed character (letters, numbers, and symbols) - WiFi password.Įase Of Use: Wireless routers have been notoriously difficult to manage in the past, but the situation has gotten a lot better recently. For best practices, make sure to have a very strong - I.e. Security: You don’t want anyone snooping around your network, so we only picked routers that support WPA2, a security standard that checks whether or not an unwanted intruder has accessed or altered any data flowing through your network. We made sure to choose routers with a long reach, so you don’t have to deal with dead zones or weak spots.
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Still, getting a WiFi 6 compatible router now means you won’t need to upgrade for many, many years, which is a major upside.Ĭoverage Area: Having a wireless router that can make a fast connection doesn’t matter much if it can’t reach every room in your house. If your plan has a maximum speed of 200Mbps (megabits per second), it won’t matter that your router’s theoretical fastest speed is five or 25 times that. Your network speed will also be limited by the internet plan you’ve chosen from your ISP (internet service provider). An overwhelming majority don’t right now - even gadgets released recently.
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To take full advantage of a WiFi 6 wireless router’s speed, your devices will need to support that standard. Both support many of the same features, including operating on both the 2.4Ghz and 5.0Ghz frequencies to avoid network congestion when a lot of devices are connected at once. We recommend a mix of WiFi 5 and WiFi 6 wireless routers because the bottleneck that caps your maximum speed probably isn’t coming from your router. Previous generation WiFi 5 routers have a theoretical maximum of 1Gbps. The hardware (chips and antennas) wireless routers use to create a WiFi network evolve every few years the latest standard is called WiFi 6, and it has a theoretical maximum speed of 11Gbps (Gigabits per second). Speed: The most important feature when getting a wireless router is its maximum speed.
There are many factors to think about when choosing the right wireless router for you below are the most important ones, which we considered while we were researching this list.