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1. N600 Wireless Dual Band Router

. 5. Next. End Genie My favorite new feature on the WNDR3800 is NETGEAR Genie. NETGEAR Genie is a standalone application that allows you manage, monitor and repair your network.

Of course, the Genie standalone program has a very similar look and feel as NETGEAR's new browser UI. They are both also referred to as 'Genie', so it's easy to get confused.

The Windows version is fully-released and there is a beta version for Mac OS 10.6 and higher. While you can't configure all of the advanced options using Genie, you can configure the most common features that you'll likely use. NETGEAR is gradually rolling out Genie support for their existing routers, but since the WNDR3800 is a new router, all of Genie's features are functional. Figure 14 shows the Genie application's home screen. I like the direct searchable support link on the Genie home page. Since many of the menu items duplicate functions found in the browser-based interface, I'll just touch on a few unique features. Figure 14: NETGEAR Genie home page Internet The Internet icon shows your current internet connection status.

If you click on the icon, you'll see a graph of the internet traffic for your current computer. Figure 15 shows the internet traffic on my computer while I was watching a Netflix video.

Figure 15: Internet traffic volume monitor Wi-Fi connection This icon shows your current Wi-Fi connection (if any) and the relative signal strength. If you click on this icon, three additional tabs are available. Figure 16 shows the number of wireless networks discovered on each channel.

If you hover your mouse over one of the bars, the names of the wireless networks appear. The Connect WiFi tab shows nearby networks and allows you to connect. Guest Access takes you to the guest access configuration page. Figure 16: There are five networks on channel 11.

Router Settings When you click on this icon, you are prompted to log into the router with the admin password. Five tabs let you configure wireless settings, ReadyShare, Guess Access, view the Traffic Meter (similar to Figure 13), and update the router firmware. Note: it's a known issue that Genie can only configure the 2.4 GHz wireless settings on a dual band router. Network Map I really like this feature.

Genie analyzes your network and displays a map of the devices. It also makes a guess as to what type of device it is. You have the option of naming the device something other than its network name or IP address, and you can choose select a host type. Changing the host type changes the icon. Figure 17 shows the network map of my home network. I have more devices than will fit onto a single page, so the map continues on a second page. The map shows Wi-Fi and wired connections but also shows devices that are no longer connected.

Figure 17: Genie network map Parental Controls This icon gives you the same functions as the Live Parental Control Management utility I covered earlier. ReadyShare This icon gives you the same functions as the ReadySHARE function in the web UI. Network Support This menu provides access to three tabs: FAQs; Tools (basic tools such as ping, trace router, DNS Lookup and Computer profile); and Support (links to downloads, forums, register your product and premium support).

Feedback A form to provide feedback to NETGEAR. Closing Thoughts Even though the WNDR3800 falls in NETGEAR's 'high' (vs. 'ultimate') performance category, it is currently the most fully-featured router in their product line. The WNDR3800 has a number of features that either differentiate it from its competition and from other NETGEAR products. I've covered most of these items already. But to summarize briefly, here are a few bullet points:.

NETGEAR genie - a new user interface found both in the web UI and as a standalone application. CD-less installation. Live Parental Controls powered by Open DNS - it's free but ad supported. Clear Channel selector - automatically and dynamically chooses the best wireless operating channel to ensure minimal interference and optimal performance. ReadySHARE Cloud - your own personal cloud storage - for free. ReadySHARE Print - Share your USB printer by plugging it into your router. DLNA server with Tivo support.

Dedicated 5GHz video mode. Internet traffic meter As with many new products, the Windows platform is fully supported, but MacOS support hasn't been fully implemented yet. For the MacOS platform, there's a ReadySHARE printer client and a beta version of Genie. Still under development, but scheduled for release fairly soon is client support for remote access via ReadySHARE as well as a bypass account utility for Live Parental Controls. There is MacOS Time Machine support for the WNDR3800, but currently there's only for 10.5 and 10.6. Time Machine support for 10.7 (Lion) should be available via a firmware upgrade 'in a couple of weeks'.

N600 Wireless Dual Band Router

Note that I pass these 'futures' along for your information, but not as guarantees. Vendors have many priorities, which often change.

So when and if these features appear is entirely undetermined. Open source fans will appreciate that there's already WNDR3800 support from DD-WRT, Open-WRT and Tomato. I don't know what features are included in the open source distributions.

But it's hard to imagine that they have support for all of the WNDR3800's premium features. My bottom line is that if you're in the market for a full-featured dual band router, the premium features on the WNDR3800 make it well worth considering. To see if the performance is as good as the feature set.

Search Wirecutter For: Search Reviews for the real world Browse Close. Browse Close. Is a dual-band, three-stream 802.11ac router with simple, functional load-balancing band steering, a feature that minimizes frustration by automatically distributing your connected devices between the router’s two wireless bands. That means right out of the box the R7000P is likely to work better than any router you’ve ever had, and you’ll never need to decide which band to connect to.

The R7000P features noticeably longer range than previous Nighthawk routers on both the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands, and its full-featured Web interface is easy to work with for novice and expert owners alike. Add in the simple setup and powerful band steering, and the R7000P is the best router for most people. Synology has been making routers for only a couple of years, but the company has lengthy experience in networking and makes our pick for. The is typically a bit more expensive than the R7000P but performs almost identically—you should buy it if our main pick is out of stock, or if the RT2600ac is available at a lower price. You’ll either love or hate its Web interface—just as Synology’s NAS devices do, this router presents a fake desktop interface inside your Web browser on top of your desktop interface.

The result is a little ridiculous, but it works well enough, and it does feel oddly comfortable, especially if you have fond memories of Windows 98. If you’re happy with your Wi-Fi, you don’t need a new router—it’s as simple as that. If you’re having problems with range, speed, or reliability, though, it might be time for an upgrade. An older router that doesn’t support 802.11ac, has a weak CPU, or lacks Gigabit Ethernet ports can hold you back significantly.

This guide covers standalone Wi-Fi routers. Any of our picks will easily outperform any router you got from your Internet service provider, or any router more than a few years old. These routers are a good fit for apartments or small to medium-size houses with three or four people on the network. If you have a larger family or a large house—more than 2,000 square feet or more than one floor—you should probably look at our instead. A good rule of thumb is that if you’ve considered adding a wireless extender or an extra access point in your house, get a mesh system instead. If you’re happy with your Wi-Fi, you don’t need a new router—it’s as simple as that. What you shouldn’t do is blindly buy either the cheapest router or the most expensive router you can find.

Quality doesn’t necessarily scale with price, and a router with a bigger number on it may not actually solve your Wi-Fi problems. What you need to know about wireless routers in 2018.

Photo: Michael Hession A typical home network in 2018 doesn’t look like it did in 2012. Without even getting into (everything from smart light bulbs to doorbells to washing machines now expects a decent Wi-Fi connection), most homes these days have two or more personal Wi-Fi devices (phone, laptop, tablet) per person, as well as smart TVs or like a Roku or an Amazon Fire TV. A busy evening in a typical home could have one person downloading game updates in a bedroom, another watching TV in the living room, and a third browsing the Web sitting on the couch—and all of that traffic demands a router that can provide fast performance for lots of devices at once.

That development has made us a lot pickier about what routers we accept as the best for the most people, and a lot more interested in new features such as band steering and a third wireless band. These features cost more, but they’re worth it. Although all modern routers are at least dual-band—offering one slower but longer-range 2.4 GHz band and one faster but shorter-range 5 GHz band—it’s not easy to take full advantage of both bands. On most routers, you have to make two separate network names—such as “mynetwork2.4” and “mynetwork5”—and then decide which of your devices should join which network.

If you don’t give your networks different names (SSIDs), in practice all your devices end up piling onto one 5 GHz band, and you’ll experience slower speeds, delays, and even dropped connections when several of them are online and busy at the same time. Band steering—specifically load-balancing band steering—lets you use a single network name for all your Wi-Fi bands and allows the router to decide which devices go on 2.4 GHz and which go on 5 GHz based on where they are in your house and how much bandwidth they’re using. Band steering is essential for mesh networks, which have multiple access points and multiple bands to deal with, but it’s important even in standalone routers, because if you aren’t using all the radios in your router, you aren’t getting all the performance you paid for. We tested this feature very carefully—unfortunately, some routers that are theoretically capable of band steering merely wind up connecting your devices to the “strongest” signal, cramming everything onto a single 5 GHz band again. Our picks are smarter than that. Tri-band routers have an extra 5 GHz band in addition to the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands of a dual-band router.

This allows more devices to connect and be busy at once without slowing the network down so much. Load-balancing band steering becomes even more important with tri-band routers—that extra radio won’t do you any good if none of your devices are connected to it. We used to recommend against spending the extra money on a tri-band router, but busier networks in more congested areas can definitely benefit. Most of the routers we tested for this guide are rated AC1900. What does that mean? Well, AC speed ratings are. In the real world, AC2300, AC1900, and AC1750 all mean pretty much the same thing: a dual-band router with one 2.4 GHz radio and one 5 GHz radio, each supporting up to three spatial streams—concurrent connections that the router can combine to increase the throughput available to your device, like adding lanes to a highway.

AC2600 means a dual-band router with four spatial streams each, and AC3200 means a tri-band router with three spatial streams each. When you see a router advertised as 2×2, 3×3, or 4×4, those pairs of numbers refer to the number of transmitters and receivers the radio has, with which the router can communicate over the spatial streams. The kicker here is that the phones, laptops, game consoles, and other devices you’re using are almost always 1×1 or 2×2 (so they support either one or two spatial streams, respectively), and the speed of the connection is determined by the device with the fewest spatial streams. A 2×2 laptop wouldn’t get any more throughput from a 4×4 router than it would from a 2×2 router, though it would still get twice as much as a 1×1 laptop. What about using those extra streams to connect to another device at the same time? For the most part, that’s a no-go. You might have a 2×2 laptop, a 2×2 phone, and a 4×4 router—but unless all three of them support a technology called, the router can talk to only one of them at once, using only two streams.

With MU-MIMO, the router could talk to the phone using two streams and to the laptop using the other two, simultaneously. Right now, routers with MU-MIMO support are common but not ubiquitous; client devices with MU-MIMO are rarer than hen’s teeth. So having MU-MIMO support—and more than three spatial streams—in your router is nice for future compatibility, but they’re not really killer features right now. How we picked. Photo: Michael Hession We looked for dual- and tri-band routers from each of the major manufacturers under $300, with a strong preference for those costing less than $200. We also looked for routers in that price range with less well-known manufacturers but a strong popular following or potentially interesting new features that set them apart.

We looked for four qualities, in a real-world environment:. Good throughput on both the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands: If you have a connection, it should be fast enough to download files quickly and stream videos smoothly. Good range on both the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands: You should be able to connect to a well-placed router from anywhere in an apartment or a small house. Band steering to help you make use of all available bands: All 802.11ac routers come with at least two wireless radios, and the router should be able to use all of them without requiring you to manually connect to separate networks. A fast processor to make the Web interface snappy and improve performance: No matter how good your radios are, the slow single-core processors found in most cheap routers can still drag things down.

Most routers also offer some other features such as VPN connections, USB ports to share printers or external drives, and limited parental filtering. We looked at those, but they’re not the main focus of our testing—we’re more concerned about the quality of the Internet access provided, because that’s what most people will notice day to day. MU-MIMO is nice for future-proofing but by no means essential. An extra 5 GHz radio (tri-band) is good for people with lots of devices but significantly adds to the price. In addition, we used customer reviews on Amazon and Newegg, plus professional router reviews and performance rankings from, and, to generate our lists of contenders.

After figuring out what’s hot, we thoroughly tested the most promising routers ourselves. How we tested. Testing for most Wi-Fi router reviews (including previous versions of this guide) 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 device divides evenly into bigger numbers for all devices. This is usually a valid assumption for wired networking, but it doesn’t work well for Wi-Fi. We made a major update to our testing methodology this year: Instead of testing for the maximum throughput from a single laptop, we used four laptops, spaced around 1,800 square feet of a single-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 than a straight Iperf throughput test would have.

Our four laptops ran the following tests:. One sat beside the living room TV and simulated a 4K video streaming session.

It tried to download data at up to 30 Mbps, but we were satisfied if it could average 25 Mbps or better, which is. The second sat in the kitchen simulating a Wi-Fi phone call. It moved only 1 Mbps of data in 64 KB chunks, but we noted whether any one 64 KB chunk of data took longer than 150 milliseconds to arrive. The third laptop sat at fairly short range in the office and simulated a Web-browsing session. Once every 20 seconds or so, it downloaded 16 128 KB files simultaneously to simulate loading a modern Web page; pages should ideally load in less than 750 milliseconds. The last laptop sat in a bedroom at long range, and downloaded a very large file.

We didn’t care about latency for our large file download, but we did want to see an overall throughput there of 40 Mbps or better. We’ve labeled this top-down sketch of our house with the locations of our router and clients for our latest testing setup. The drawing isn’t perfectly to scale, but it is a close approximation of the various rooms, closets, and walls that our routers’ signals needed to pass through. Illustration: Kim Ku 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. Although your network probably isn’t always that busy, it is that busy often enough—and those busy times are when you’re most likely to get annoyed, so they’re what we were modeling in our tests. We ran these tests two different ways.

The first method (which we called hard mode) exposed the difference that automatic band steering made in the quality of a large network: To accurately simulate real-world usage, we set up the routers using default settings and put all bands on the same SSID (network name), letting the router sort out which band to assign each device. Manual band steering was easy mode. (Easy for the router, that is, but more annoying for the user.) We gave each radio its own SSID, as is the case in most home networks, and carefully allocated the laptops to best split up the traffic. For dual-band routers, this meant our long-range download went on the 2.4 GHz band, and all other traffic went on the 5 GHz band. For tri-band routers, we put the 4K-stream laptop on the third band.

After reconnecting all our devices manually to the separate SSIDs, we ran another five-minute test. Both of these tests measured range, throughput, and the router’s ability to multitask. Hard mode also tested the router’s load-balancing band steering. If you just want to connect to the Wi-Fi and have it work without constantly fiddling with things, hard mode is the best test.

We also tested 5 GHz maximum throughput at approximately 20 feet, with one interior wall between router and laptop; 5 GHz throughput at about 35 feet, with four interior walls and some cabinetry in the way, at an oblique angle; and 2.4 GHz throughput at the same range. We did not use —an artificial network-testing tool that moves data from one machine to another as fast as possible—even for the relatively simple throughput tests.

Instead we used 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. Because we were testing in the real world, external variables (competing signals, walls, network traffic) affected our results, just as they’ll likely affect yours. 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 major issues in real-world conditions. Our pick: Netgear R7000P Nighthawk.

The is the best router for most people because it offers solid performance for multiple devices without a lot of hassle. It has good range and speed plus working-out-of-the-box band steering, so you don’t need to juggle multiple network names. Although it doesn’t offer the absolute best performance for individual devices at either short or long range, it does have the best mix, among all the routers we tested, of good range, high throughput, useful features, and easy setup. The R7000P really shines under busy network conditions: In our tests, its load-balancing band steering automatically shifted the devices around to give work to both radios. Compared with our, the TP-Link Archer A7, the R7000P boasts band steering, much longer range, a faster CPU, and—even when you manually manage its two radios—better multi-client performance. The R7000P ran neck and neck with in our multi-client testing but passed the RT2600ac by a small margin in long-range 5 GHz throughput. The R7000P also supports Disney’s new without the need for a separate physical device.

This test measured how long it took to fetch a Web page, with the X axis of the chart noting what percentage of requests were fulfilled in that amount of time. A value of 1000 ms at 50 percent means that half of all requests had 1 second or less of latency. A line rocketing off the top of the chart at 75 percent would indicate a very frustrated user under the conditions tested, but the R7000P doesn’t have that problem. In our automatic band steering (hard mode) tests, we left the router’s configuration as close to out-of-the-box as we could and created a single network name with all of the test devices joined to it. This chart shows how long it took our test laptop to simulate browsing to a Web page while three other laptops around the house were busy doing other things like downloading files or streaming video.

The R7000P’s routing features are excellent and complete: Port forwarding, static routing, DHCP leases, and access modes, dynamic DNS, and UPnP are all easy to find and work as expected, along with less-common features such as VPN support and a toggle for the router’s LEDs. The R7000P really shines under busy network conditions: In our tests, its load-balancing band steering automatically shifted the devices around to give work to both radios. Along with its long range and good performance on both 5 GHz and 2.4 GHz, this translates into a good user experience even when the network’s busy.

Even the slowest 1 percent of our requests came back in quickly enough that we think most people won’t be eyeing their browser’s refresh button and wondering if they should click it. Our long-term real-world testing backs up our lab tests: Kevin Purdy, Wirecutter senior staff writer, stated, “I didn’t honestly believe that upgrading to the R7000P would extend wireless range inside my old, not-at-all open home. But since installing it, Wi-Fi has been restored to our bedroom, keeping our data bills lowered.” It also improved senior editor Nathan Edwards’s Wi-Fi at home: “Even though it’s in the far upstairs corner, the R7000P covers almost the entire house well it works well enough that I don’t think about it much, which is maybe the greatest router gift of all.” By contrast, the Archer A7 loaded Web pages noticeably slower even when we created two network names and joined our devices to each of them intelligently to get acceptable results (manual band steering). We’re not thrilled about having to manage multiple SSIDs, either.

The R7000P costs around twice as much as the Archer A7, but in the long run (especially if you have lots of devices), it’s worth paying extra for band steering alone. For more detailed latency results, including comparisons with many more routers, see the later in this guide. Single-device throughput isn’t the R7000P’s best feature, but this router is still pretty good at it. Raw throughput isn’t the best way to measure a router’s overall performance, but it is handy at moderate and long ranges to give an idea of a router’s coverage. The R7000P did a solid job at all ranges and all frequencies in our tests, making it an easy recommendation for just about any house.

The R7000P’s routing features are excellent and complete: Port forwarding, static routing, DHCP leases, and access modes, dynamic DNS, and UPnP are all easy to find and work as expected, along with less-common features such as VPN support and a toggle for the router’s LEDs. You can use the built-in OpenVPN service either to connect your own devices to the home network from the road or to send your home network’s traffic out to a third-party VPN if you’re concerned about your ISP spying on you.

Like most standard home routers, the R7000P features one WAN and four LAN Gigabit Ethernet ports. It also offers one USB 3.0 port on the front and an additional USB 2.0 port on the back. Netgear advertises the USB ports as places to plug in thumb drives or external hard drives for streaming and shared storage. This model goes a step beyond the common FTP or SMB sharing protocols and offers Netgear’s proprietary ReadyCloud, a locally hosted Dropbox-like service. We did not test this feature thoroughly, but we are hesitant to recommend it: Services such as Dropbox or Google Drive store your data on professionally maintained, redundant hardware, and a USB drive stuck in a router is a pretty poor substitute. Netgear labels the R7000P as AC2300, but, and we recommend that you not get too hung up on them—anything labeled AC1750 or above can perform well in real-world use, and only actual testing can determine which models are good, bad, or mediocre. Flaws but not dealbreakers.

The biggest shortcoming of the Netgear R7000P compared with some other routers in its price range is its lack of a third wireless band. Although three bands won’t make any single device go faster, the more bands you have available, the less fighting with one another your devices will go through to reach the Internet—and between smartphones, tablets, laptops, printers, and streaming TVs, most people have a lot of devices to connect. If you’re in a suburban home, this lack of a third band isn’t a big issue. It might be more of a problem in a crowded apartment complex, dorm, or row-house environment. If you have too many neighboring networks interfering, 2.4 GHz becomes near-unusable. In that case, a “third” band is really only a “second” band, and it becomes almost a necessity. The only other problem I have with Netgear’s Nighthawk series is the presence of a few effectively useless features.

Supposedly, you can block websites by domain name or keyword, but in practice the feature works only with non-HTTPS sites, which means almost no modern sites. You won’t be able to block Facebook, Yahoo, Reddit, or most, ahem, adult sites, all of which use HTTPS. The Nighthawk series also claims to offer more general category-based filtering, which really amounts to nothing more than a link to OpenDNS, where you can set up an account.

Trying to manage what little integration exists between the OpenDNS account and your router is an exercise in pain and frustration, and brighter kids (let alone determined adults) will easily find ways around it anyway. The R7000P also supports Disney’s subscription-based parental filtering service,. We can’t tell you whether Circle works well yet, but it is a third option for filtering that hopefully will be more functional than the first two were. Runner-up: Synology RT2600ac. The is a full-featured, very configurable router with good range and coverage. Its performance is so close to the R7000P Nighthawk’s that you need test-results and a good eye to tell them apart. If our main pick is unavailable—or if you find a better deal on the RT2600ac—this model is the one to buy.

This model’s Smart Connect band steering did require some minor tuning on our part. It was configured out of the box to steer devices to 2.4 GHz only if the 5 GHz signal was extremely low, which effectively meant nothing in our test house would ever use 2.4 GHz under any circumstances. Changing that threshold from -92 dBM to -75 dBM in the settings made our long-range laptop immediately connect at 2.4 GHz while the closer-range ones continued to connect at 5 GHz. Want a desktop inside the browser running on your desktop? Synology’s got you covered. Synology has long been a leader in the small-business and home NAS arena, but it’s a newcomer to routers.

The RT2600ac, its flagship router, borrows the desktop-in-a-browser Web interface from Synology’s NAS devices. There’s also an attractive and competent mobile interface, if you prefer to use smartphones for configuration. You can’t get to everything in the mobile interface that you can in the full Web interface, but most people will find that what’s there is plenty. We’ve seen a dismaying trend of vendors replacing their inexpensive but well-engineered older models with poorly performing stuff that’s cheaper to manufacture. Fortunately, is a new, inexpensive design that is missing a few features compared with our top picks but has good enough range and performance to keep budget-conscious buyers happy.

When we took the time to set up two different network names and split our devices up between them manually, the A7 performed nearly as well as our main picks for about half the cost. Right now, it’s not realistic to expect a sub-$100 router to offer band steering or have quite the range and coverage of a flagship.

It should have decent coverage, though, and it should be reliable. This means your devices shouldn’t randomly drop off the network for no reason, and if you set up two network names for the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands and distribute your devices between them, within its somewhat shorter range a budget model should at least get close to the performance of a flagship router. This describes the Archer A7 to a tee. Competing budget routers like Netgear’s R6700v2 and D-Link’s DIR-878 performed poorly and were prone to dropping connections during our testing, but the Archer A7 didn’t have the same issues.

The A7 was also at least usable even with everything crammed onto the 5 GHz radio. When we took the time to set up two different network names and split our devices up between them manually, the A7 performed nearly as well as our main picks for about half the cost.

Like almost every Wi-Fi router available today, the Archer A7 sports a black plastic case with wiggly antennas, one Gigabit Ethernet port for your Internet connection and four more for local devices, and a USB port. The Archer A7’s USB port is only 2.0, and TP-Link suggests its use with a thumb drive for local or remote file sharing. We did not test this feature but cannot really recommend it—exposing your local data to the Internet is almost always a bad idea, and inside the network, you’re probably better off sharing files directly from your computer (or from, if you have a lot of stuff to store). We also recommend you step up to one of our main picks if you want to use a VPN connection; the Archer A7 offers one, but its weak processor will make that connection frustratingly slow. An overview of the test results. After we ran our full set of tests on all the routers in the group, a few things stood out—such as the importance of managing which band your devices connect on.

As a reminder, band steering handles the management for you; without band steering, to get the best performance you need to manually connect your devices to separate network names, such as “mynet2.4” and “mynet5,” associated with each of your router’s radios. Run too many things on the same radio, or try to connect a long-range device to 5 GHz instead of 2.4 GHz, and your latency will suffer. Running our test suite with all devices manually assigned to the most appropriate radios, we saw little difference between most of the routers we tested. We limited the X-axis scale on this chart to 8000 ms; otherwise the DIR-867’s extremely poor showing would have made all the other routers completely indistinguishable. This is a stacked bar graph of the mean latency results of each router’s Web browsing, VoIP call, 4K video stream, and download workloads, respectively.

Latency measures how long it takes your inputs to reach the other end of the connection—the time between your clicking a link and the page loading. Unresponsive Web browsing is the first thing most people notice going wrong, so we’ve sorted our results by the length of that bar here. You can get similarly good latency results too, if you carefully manage all your phones, tablets, laptops, and TVs to split them up between your router’s radios, and do it optimally. Things got a lot different when we ran the same tests the way most people use their wireless devices in the real world: by joining them all to a single network name and being done with it. The D-Link DIR-878 is not shown on this graph, as it was not able to complete a test run in hard mode at all. The best devices here returned the same or nearly the same results in our hard-mode test (relying on the router’s band steering) as they did in easy mode (manual allocation) because their band steering managed the device connection for us.

The difference was dramatic: Our picks, the Netgear R7000P and Synology RT2600ac, didn’t stand out at all on the easy-mode graph—but when we used just a single network name, suddenly they rocketed into the top two spots on the list. Our budget pick, the Archer A7, didn’t beat anything but the two struggling D-Link devices in hard mode, since with no band steering it was effectively limited to 5 GHz. But it’s still usable, even with one radio tied behind its back—and if you are willing to manage your own connections, it is almost as good as a $200 router, for less than $100. Unresponsive Web browsing is the first thing most people notice going wrong.

Before we finish up with latency, let’s take a more detailed look. Instead of just presenting an average, here’s performance by percentile—in other words, not just what the quality of service looked like most of the time, but also what it looked like at its worst. (This is the same graph from the “Our pick” section.). This graph shows how long it took to fetch a Web page. These are “hard mode” results, meaning we put both the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz radios on the same SSID and had the router manage which devices were connected to which band. What this graph shows is how many milliseconds it took to simulate loading a Web page during our hard-mode tests.

On the left side of the graph is the 50th-percentile result—the result in the middle of the range. Then we took a sample at the 75th, 90th, 95th, and 100th percentile—the last being the worst results we got out of each device.

Keep in mind that while the laptop in this test was loading Web pages, three others were (simulating) downloading a big file, streaming 4K video, and making a VoIP phone call—this was a busy little network, at a busy time. TP-Link’s Archer A7 didn’t do that well in hard mode, but it posted decent results for half the price.

The R7000P and Synology RT2600ac are neck and neck across the entire graph. These are both very capable routers that did a consistently good job in our testing, leaving us little to choose between based on performance alone. Netgear’s older R7800 struggled by comparison; it behaved better than our budget pick (not shown on this graph) but not by much, and it generally costs slightly more than the R7000P, so that’s a nonstarter. Asus’s RT-AC3200 also did poorly in this regard, due to its poor band-steering implementation.

D-Link’s DIR-878 is not shown; we couldn’t get it to stay connected to all four stations long enough to complete the test. The Netgear R7000P and Synology RT2600ac both provided a pretty smooth experience up until the 95th percentile, where things got a little wonky. This is a pretty good indicator of what living with either model is like in real life: One of every 20 or so page loads will be noticeably slower than average. With that “worst case” still under 1500 ms, that’s not terrible by any means—but if you want things to get even more reliable, you’ll need to step up to, or even wired access points. Moving on to the budget category, things get a little more interesting.

D-Link’s DIR-867 rockets off the top of the chart at 75 percent, an accurate reflection of our experience using it—this model and its big sibling, the DIR-878, were both tweaky and unreliable. That left the budget-pick competition between the Archer A7 and Netgear’s R6700v2. Although the R6700v2 looks slightly better than the Archer A7 in this graph, it was much more difficult to work with. The A7 just plain worked and didn’t give us any trouble, whereas the R6700v2—like D-Link’s DIR-878 and DIR-867—tended to drop connections and require a lot of frustrating coddling. Even though the A7 wasn’t as fast as our main picks, it was just as reliable, making it a shoo-in for our budget pick. We’ve changed the Y-axis scale here; this time we’re cropping the graph at 1500 ms to make it a little easier to see what’s going on. In our easy-mode test—where we had one SSID for 2.4 GHz and one for 5 GHz, and connected laptops appropriately to each—the results were much tighter.

When we looked at our routers in easy mode—where we configured one SSID for the 2.4 GHz band and another for 5 GHz, and manually connected each laptop to the most appropriate network—the results got much tighter. In this graph, our two main picks, the Netgear R7000P and Synology RT2600ac, are still the best performers, but the competition is much closer; in particular, TP-Link’s Archer A7, our budget pick, is very close behind them and looking good. If you have a relatively small place and you’re willing to manage your 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz networks by hand like we did here, the A7 can serve you nearly as well as our main picks can.

By contrast, you can see D-Link’s DIR-878 and DIR-867, and Netgear’s R6700v2, rocketing off the chart at one point or another. This reflects the inconsistent performance and dropped connections we experienced with those other budget routers we tested. As helpful as good band steering can be, it’s a fix only for busy, congested networks where all the devices have good connections.

If you’re having problems with your network’s range, generally you can better solve them with a (or a set of wired access points like the Ubiquiti system) than with a single router. There are still definite differences between routers themselves, though. I find that the best way to assess range is the old-fashioned way: by checking the throughput. We got a good idea of each router’s range by testing its raw throughput with a single device at moderate range on 5 GHz and (very) long range on 2.4 GHz. The office in our test house was a straight 24-foot shot from the router, with only a single interior door between the two. Any router should handle a connection at this distance effortlessly, and for the most part, our selections here did—only the D-Link routers struggled with this unobstructed short-range test.

The test point in the bedroom was 43 feet away from the router, passing through four interior walls and some miscellaneous cabinetry at an oblique angle along the way. That’s on the extreme side of long range for 5 GHz, but it’s well within the range and penetration you can expect of 2.4 GHz, as the above graph shows. If your 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi connection feels slow and glitchy even when you have four or five bars showing on your phone, tablet, or laptop, your problem isn’t range, it’s congestion.

The 2.4 GHz band is quite busy—Wi-Fi routers have used it for almost two decades, but your network is also fighting for space with everything from cordless phones to Bluetooth accessories to microwave ovens. If you’re having “plenty of bars, but no speed” problems, you’ll have to limit yourself to the less-busy 5 GHz band, and that changes your options.

In the chart above, you can see how much harder it was for us to deliver a long-range signal to the bedroom on 5 GHz instead of 2.4 GHz. This is a feature as much as it is a bug—shorter range means less congestion from neighboring networks. If your 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi connection feels slow and glitchy even when you have four or five bars, your problem isn’t range, it’s congestion. At the range we used (43 feet, with several walls in the way), very few routers can achieve as much throughput on the theoretically “faster” 5 GHz band as they do on 2.4 GHz.

But if you have the kind of congestion issues we described above, you should limit yourself to one of the routers at the top of the graph, a position that indicates excellent long-range performance at 5 GHz specifically. You should also more strongly consider a tri-band router like if you’re in a very crowded environment that doesn’t permit the effective use of 2.4 GHz (and isn’t large enough to justify using a mesh-networking kit instead). An extra 5 GHz band is nice to have even when you can use all three bands—but if you own a lot of devices and 2.4 GHz doesn’t work for you, it might be a necessity. Router setup and network maintenance. Photo: Michael Hession Regardless of the router you’re using, you need to do a few things to maintain a secure, reliable wireless connection:. To access your router’s Web-based configuration screen, that your router’s manufacturer may have provided as a shortcut—they’ve been known to get hijacked and can open you up to attack.

Instead, connect a desktop or laptop to the router (wired or wireless), open a Web browser, and type in the router’s IP address;. As soon as you set up your router, change its administrator password. Use WPA2-PSK (AES) encryption for the best speed and security on your Wi-Fi networks. (Use your router’s mixed-mode setting—AES and TKIP—only if you have older devices that don’t support WPA2.). Immediately check for any available firmware updates for your router, and recheck every few months.

Updating will help ensure you get the best performance, security, and reliability. If you’re interested in some straightforward steps you can take to make your router more secure, we like. Try to place your router in a in your home. Don’t stash it next to a bunch of other electronics, and don’t just. Don’t waste your time wiggling the antennas around—they’re omnidirectional. You can’t get more than a 1 or 2 dBM gain—or loss—from a different antenna position, and that isn’t enough to fix any problems you might be having. Don’t just connect everything to your 5 GHz radio “because it’s faster.” Yes, 5 GHz is faster than 2.4 GHz—at short range, at least.

But the more devices you’ve got crammed onto a single radio, the more problems you’ll encounter. If you don’t have or aren’t using band steering, be sure to manually connect your devices to all the bands your router offers. To optimize your network, grab an app such as (PC/Android), (Android, open source) or (Mac) to make sure you’ve configured your Wi-Fi networks correctly. See whether competing wireless networks are present on channels on the 2.4 GHz band, or if any other Wi-Fi networks are on the 5 GHz band.

If you’re having a lot of problems with lots of signal bars but slow speeds, try changing to a different Wi-Fi channel—but don’t get too hung up on which channel seems to have the most networks visible. Active Wi-Fi use is what causes congestion—one neighbor network with kids home all day playing might give you more trouble than three neighbor networks with little or no activity.

If your laptop is having issues connecting to your router, make sure that you have the latest drivers for your laptop’s Wi-Fi card. You can usually find these on your laptop manufacturer’s website, but the Wi-Fi card’s manufacturer might have more-recent drivers.

We encountered this issue once during our testing: One of our laptops, an Acer, would connect to a router’s wireless-ac network but drop the speeds to almost nothing. When we updated our Acer laptop with Wi-Fi drivers straight from Intel, which were newer than the ones Acer offered, our problem went away. What to look forward to. The is an AC2300 802.11ac router with band steering and MU-MIMO support, starting at about $135.

We plan to test it against our current picks soon. Also from TP-Link, the is an AC2600 802.11ac router with band steering, beamforming, and MU-MIMO support. It starts at $170, and works with (for changing router configuration on the fly). We’ll test it once it’s available this winter.

Four-stream (PDF) routers are, but you probably. Next to our picks, their range and performance aren’t sufficiently better to justify their high prices, and you’ll find very few four-stream or MU-MIMO client devices that could take advantage of their new features. MU-MIMO is a great feature, and once client-device support for it matures, it’ll be a must-have.

But extra radios (tri-band routers, or mesh-networking kits that use different channels at each node) can do more for you than MU-MIMO can—and you don’t need to wait for anything else before you can use them effectively. Also known as WiGig, a new protocol dubbed 802.11ad should be able to offer real-world gigabit link speeds—comparable to a wired Ethernet connection. Unfortunately, 802.11ad uses the 60 GHz band, which has trouble passing through physical objects. The recommended usage is same-room-only, with a clear line of sight—making such models almost completely irrelevant to the way we use Wi-Fi today.

The cost is also pretty eye-watering: Netgear’s R9000, which includes a 60 GHz 802.11ad radio, is selling for $450 as of July 2017. And absent a or a or two, few client devices have WiGig. (Sensing a trend?) Finally, there’s, which will replace the current 802.11ac protocol the same way 802.11ac replaced 802.11n. With 802.11ax, MU-MIMO support will extend to uploads (it currently applies to downloads only). A new feature called OFDMA will allow central scheduling of client-device transmissions, which should greatly ease congestion within busy networks. Finally, Spatial Frequency Reuse—or “coloring”—should greatly decrease congestion with neighboring networks, by allowing your devices and the neighbors’ to transmit even when they can hear one another, as long as they reduce their own transmit power enough to avoid trampling one another when they do. This should be a big, big win for people struggling in crowded apartment complexes and dorm environments.

In October 2018, the Wi-Fi Alliance, an industry organization responsible for certifying that Wi-Fi devices work together, Wi-Fi 802.11n as “Wi-Fi 4,” 802.11ac as “Wi-Fi 5,” and 802.11ax as “Wi-Fi 6.” We hope the new terminology will help simplify explanations. Unfortunately, 802.11ax/Wi-Fi 6 won’t be ratified and declared officially until sometime in 2019. Much as with the current MU-MIMO situation, many of its best features won’t work properly unless all (or at least most) of the devices within range of the router also support 802.11ax. This means mainstream 802.11ax support effectively starts sometime in 2021—so if you’re in need of a router, go ahead and buy one of our current picks now instead of trying to hold out for 802.11ax. The competition. Some of the routers we tested in late 2017 (clockwise, from top left): Netgear R7000P, Ignition Labs Portal, D-Link DIR-880L, Netgear R8000.

Photo: Michael Hession Our previous pick: TP-Link Archer C7 The was our main pick for several years due to a combination of an extremely low price, a long range, and high throughput. Our new budget pick, the Archer A7, is the continuation of the C7 line under a new name.

The C7 does a good job within its limitations, but the $200 routers outperform it, particularly if you don’t want to manage multiple SSIDs (network names). Everything else The is a tri-band router at a flagship dual-band router price, with great range and coverage, and really good device- and traffic-analysis capabilities in its UI. Unfortunately, its band steering was broken when we first tested it, and is still broken; it claims to steer across all three bands, but in our testing it never once connected a device on 2.4 GHz. Although that performance was enough for us to make it our runner-up pick in 2017, this year Synology’s much better-behaved (but dual-band) RT2600ac has displaced it. Going just by its name, looks like it ought to be an upgrade to the R7000P—bigger number, better router, right? It’s an older model, and it doesn’t support band steering. If it were cheap, it would make a good budget pick; as things stand, it’s nearly the same price as the R7000P, and we think the newer model is a much better choice for most people.

Is another tri-band router bearing a dual-band router price tag. It offers MU-MIMO support, 4×4 radios, and—unusual for TP-Link—a fast 1.4 GHz dual-core processor. Unfortunately, what it doesn’t offer is band steering, which makes those three radios worthless in normal use. The C5400 also had lackluster long-range 5 GHz performance in our tests. For most people, it’s not a great fit. Used to be a budget pick, but the original hardware was discontinued, and the new model—the R6700v2—is worse. It has a MIPS CPU instead of the older model’s more-powerful ARM processor, and the MediaTek radios that the R6700v2 uses are tweaky and unreliable.

Apple officially the in spring 2018. When this device was current, it was a decent but not great home router; now that it’s unsupported, we don’t think it’s worth buying at any price. You’re better off with one of our picks, which offer higher performance at a reduced cost. The is attractively priced and offers really good short-range 5 GHz performance.

However, in our tests its longer-range 5 GHz performance was quite poor, and its 2.4 GHz performance was mediocre; it also features no band steering. If you have a really small apartment and you live alone, the Titan might win you over—its short-range 5 GHz performance really was great in our tests. If you’re in even a moderately sized house, or if you have lots of devices or network users, though, you can do better. Is a tri-band router with band steering—sort of. Unfortunately, whoever designed it doesn’t seem to have been particularly clear on what it’s for.

When we tested the EA8300 in 2017, its version of “band steering” ignored the 2.4 GHz radio entirely and connected each of our devices to the strongest signal between its two 5 GHz radios. The problem is, those two radios sit about an inch and a half away from each other in the same small plastic box.

In practice, this meant that all our devices got crammed onto the first 5 GHz radio as though the router had no band steering at all. The touchscreen setup for worked as advertised. Setting up the network, setting up Wi-Fi, and getting connected to the Internet were all simple and easy, with me standing right in front of the network closet and tap-tapping away. Some parts of the process were a little clunkier than they should have been, but it all worked from the touchscreen itself. All in all, the setup and configuration experience was a great success, and I’d love to see other routers following suit. Unfortunately, the Wi-Fi from the Almond+ was mediocre at best and particularly underwhelming at long range. It’s not an expensive device, so if you dig the smart-home management features, the mediocre Wi-Fi might make the Almond+ worthwhile.

If your main focus is high-quality Wi-Fi, though, you can do a lot better. The is an odd duck.

The model number and slightly higher price position it as an upgrade to our former pick, the Archer C7, but in our testing it performed worse in every way. The C9 also suffers from a weird, awkward standing-on-end design, and TP-Link currently sells five separate hardware revisions, making it hard to tell what you’re going to get, or how long the company will support it, if you buy one. The is D-Link’s replacement for the discontinued DIR-880L. On paper, the DIR-878 should be just as good, if not better. In practice, it isn’t. Like its “little” sibling the DIR-867 and Netgear’s R6700v2, it uses MediaTek radios; so far we haven’t seen anything with a MediaTek Wi-Fi chipset that performs reliably. Is a lower-cost version of the DIR-878.

Under the hood, it uses the exact same CPU and Wi-Fi chipsets as its larger counterpart, but—oddly—it tends to perform slightly better. “Better” isn’t the same thing as “well,” though, and we cannot recommend either router.

The makes bold claims about performing leaps and bounds better than competing routers, by making use of DFS frequencies. The theory is, if your environment is swamped with lots of devices, using frequencies that they can’t use will make your experience better. Unfortunately, those frequencies are restricted for a reason: They’re used by military radar, air-traffic controllers, and similar high-priority devices.

Though it’s legal to use those frequencies in civilian devices, you have to respect the “big boy” devices’ priority and cease transmission entirely if you can sniff even a hint of them in operation. This limitation led to very poor results for the Portal in our testing. The less said about, the better. The DIR-842 was unable to connect at all in our second bedroom, on either 5 GHz or 2.4 GHz, even when we moved it nearly 20 feet closer to the router (but still in the same room).

Its throughput was also poor at the relatively short-range office test site. Even if you’re on a budget, you should dig deeper in your pocket to get something better. The top floor of our 3,500-square-foot, two-story test house is about 2,300 square feet. We tested routers in about 1,800 square feet of that, with the router placed pretty close to one corner. Most people’s routers end up in one corner of the house or apartment, but if you’re lucky enough to have a more central placement, you may be able to cover considerably more square footage. Our longest-distance test point was 43 feet away from the router, with four interior walls and some miscellaneous cabinetry and stuff in between. A lot of the devices we tested—though not our picks—had serious trouble at that site.

You should probably expect a similar combination of distance and walls or furniture to be the limit of solid coverage in your own home, too; going from one story to another is roughly equivalent to passing through two extra interior walls. The test was actually downloading a 1 MB file over and over as fast as it could. This test measured throughput and speed, and—more important—put a constant load on the router that the other devices on the network had to work around.

For example, a security advisory in mid-2015 found that 92 different routers from 26 vendors—including TP-Link’s Archer C7—were potentially affected by a vulnerability related to their USB port sharing. TP-Link published a firmware update fairly quickly to fix this exploit for the C7 and many of the company’s other routers, but owners had to download and install it manually. Your router won’t send you an email or otherwise alert you when a new firmware update is available.