The top finisher on the 5GHz band turned out to be the Netgear Nighthawk Pro Gaming XR500, which averaged more than 250Mbps across all of my speed tests, including ones in the back of my house where the signal strength is typically poor. When you add in the additional tests I ran to double-check a result or measure the impact of specific features, it amounts to roughly 1,000 speed tests and counting. Then, I'd average that data with the first batch of tests.įourteen routers, five locations in my home, three tests per location, two rounds of tests (at minimum). ISP speeds can fluctuate throughout the day, so to help account for this as best as I could, I'd run this whole process again with each router at a later time. Throughout all of my tests, I always kept a TV streaming live video from PlayStation Vue ( RIP) to simulate normal household network traffic in a controlled fashion (and also so my very patient roommate could at least watch TV while politely staying off the Wi-Fi during my tests).Īfter running multiple speed tests from each of those locations, I averaged everything together. To gather my data, I ran an abundance of speed tests from five different locations in my home, ranging from the living room where the router lives to a back bathroom on the opposite end of the house. The goal was to get a good look at the types of speeds most people would experience if they brought one of these routers into their home.Īmplifi's app lets you choose between Latency and Throughput modes depending on your needs, and it includes helpful features like signal strength indicators for the plug-in extenders. I ran my speed tests on a Dell XPS 13 laptop that's a few years old and doesn't support Wi-Fi 6. This time, I tested each router in my own home, a smallish shotgun-style house of about 1,200 square feet where I have AT&T fiber internet speeds of up to 300Mbps. To account for this, we ran a second batch of tests. Remember, your router can only pull data from the cloud as fast as your ISP speed allows and signal strength will vary from home to home based on the layout and the amount of obstructions in the way. Measuring top speeds in a controlled test environment gives us a clear look at what these routers are technically capable of, but you won't see speeds that fast in your home. Once we're able to test everything in a controlled setting once more, we'll update this section with fresh data. One last note: We don't have full access to our test lab this year as a result of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, so we haven't been able to run this same test with some of the newer models we've reviewed. The aforementioned DIR-867 and the Zyxel Armor Z2 each scored well in this speed test, too. Meanwhile, our top overall pick, the Asus RT-AC86U, was right behind it with the second-fastest Wi-Fi 5 speed on the 5GHz band, though its speed dipped a bit at medium range. That Netgear model was also the fastest Wi-Fi 5 router on the 5GHz band, which tells us that it's a pretty capable piece of hardware. That, coupled with the fact that it includes a Quality of Service engine that can prioritize gaming traffic, is what made it an easy value pick among this field. Right behind it, the D-Link DIR-867, which also holds the distinction of being the cheapest router we tested for this roundup. In fact, the router with the fastest average speeds across all distances on the 2.4GHz band was actually the Netgear Nighthawk Pro Gaming XR500, which doesn't support Wi-Fi 6 at all. I should note that those Wi-Fi 6 routers didn't blow the competition away on the 2.4GHz band (again, blue). When we increased the distance to 75 feet, the average speed fell to 868Mbps, which is still a faster speed than any of the Wi-Fi 5 routers we tested were able to reach at all, even up close. The fastest among them was the TP-Link Archer AX6000, which we measured an average speed of 1,523Mbps on the 5GHz band at a distance of 5 feet. Bear in mind that we're running these speed tests on a laptop that supports Wi-Fi 6! If we weren't, those bars would likely be a lot shorter. First, it's easy to spot the three Wi-Fi 6 routers we tested up at the top - they clocked top speeds on the 5GHz band that were much, much faster than any other router we tested. Here's what jumps out at me from these results. As for wireless speeds, the graph above shows the top speeds for each router on both the 2.4GHz band (blue) and the faster 5GHz band (red) at distances of 5, 37.5 and 75 feet.
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