![]() ![]() For a typical household a single router should work fine and, if you do need a boost, you can buy a reasonably priced extender. Meshes are generally a lot more expensive than individual routers, however. These can all be conveniently managed from a central dashboard or app, and you can easily add extra nodes if needed. Should I consider a mesh?Ī mesh system can provide much greater range than a single router, normally using two or three satellite stations situated around your home. At this point, it’s only worth it if you’re planning to stick with a large number of Wi-Fi 5 devices for the foreseeable future. So as more and more devices shift to Wi-Fi 6, there’s less reason to pay the premium for a tri-band router. Wi-Fi 6 is designed to keep running smoothly when dozens or even hundreds of devices are connected. To reduce this effect, 802.11ac routers often use a tri-band design, with connections balanced across two separate 5GHz radios. With Wi-Fi 5, speeds can progressively drop off as more and more devices connect to a single radio. With the latest Wi-Fi 6 routers already achieving excellent performance at very reasonable prices, we’d say for most people it’s not worth waiting. At the time of writing, there are just a handful of devices that support the standard and compatible routers are very expensive. ![]() However, 6E requires both the router and the client to have 6GHz-capable hardware. This has less interference than the 5GHz band, so it helps achieve the fastest connection possible. Wi-Fi 6E is a new extension to Wi-Fi 6 that uses the previously unavailable 6GHz frequency range. READ NEXT: Best wireless routers Should I wait for Wi-Fi 6E? Needless to say, though, a new router won’t make these devices run any faster – to get the speed benefits, both ends of the connection need to be using Wi-Fi 6. Even older hardware using the ageing 802.11n or 802.11g standards will be fine. Will a Wi-Fi 6 router still work with my old devices?įear not: a Wi-Fi 6 router will work perfectly well with phones and laptops that still use 802.11ac. That’s the sort of performance range you can expect, but the only way to get a real handle on comparative speeds is to refer to real-world tests such as the ones in our reviews below. For comparison, the best Wi-Fi 5 routers we’ve tried have peaked at around 240Mbits/sec (30MB/sec). In practice, we’ve found that a typical Wi-Fi 6 router should be capable of delivering download speeds of around 480Mbits/sec (60MB/sec) at close range, while the very best models hit around 1Gbit/sec (125MB/sec). These ratings provide a rough and ready comparison between different router models, but they tell you very little about real-world performance. The prefix tells you whether the router uses Wi-Fi 5 (802.11ac) or Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax), while the number is the total combined bandwidth of all the router’s radios. Routers are often advertised with speed ratings such as “AC2000” or “AX3000”. What speeds should I expect from Wi-Fi 6? However, this means you’re effectively running two networks at once, which could cause problems when clients try to talk to one another, or if you need to configure port forwarding. It is possible to simply plug your new router directly into the old one without changing any settings. Another option is to switch the new router into Access Point mode (sometimes known as Bridge mode), which lets the old router continue to manage your LAN, while devices can connect to the new router via faster Wi-Fi 6. ![]() If your old router offers a “modem mode”, this lets the new router take over all management of your home network. You can then use an Ethernet cable to connect it to the WAN socket of your new router. Third-party routers don’t usually include their own modems, so if you’re currently using an ISP-provided router, you may need to keep this connected to the wall socket to handle your internet connection.
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