Who we are, and how we are paid

NetVerdict compares mesh systems and single routers, access points and repeaters, switches and PoE switches, network cards and USB adapters, powerline kits, print servers and KVM switches, NAS enclosures and the drives built for them, internal and external hard drives, NVMe, SATA and portable solid-state drives, UPS units — and the patch leads, panels, keystone modules, plugs, cabinets, fibre, transceivers, enclosures, docks and surge strips ordered the following week — across 38 categories and five language editions. We are a small independent editorial operation, not a retailer, not a brand, and not a media group.

We write about what carries traffic around a home or a small office and what holds the files at the end of it, and only about that. Docking stations and USB hubs belong to a sister site, not to this one. So does the video cabling behind a television, and so do memory cards themselves — a card reader is covered here as a reader, on its host link and its slots, without telling you which card to put in it. Left out entirely: rack-scale equipment meant for a data centre, telephone systems, anything that carries mains wiring beyond a plug and a socket strip, and network security consultancy, which is advice rather than a specification. What remains is hardware chosen on published lines and lived with for years.

Of everything a site like this has to be careful with, one habit matters enough to sit at the top of the page rather than in a footnote. A class figure is arithmetic, not a rate. The four or five digits printed after AX or BE add up the theoretical peak rates the standard defines for every radio in the unit, and no single link has ever reached the total; the same holds for a switching capacity, which counts every port running flat out in both directions at once. We report the figure the maker printed, we say what it adds together, and we do not translate it into a speed anybody will see. The same restraint applies to a stated coverage area, which rests on assumptions about walls that differ from one maker to the next, and to a powerline figure, which describes a standard rather than the wiring in your building.

There is exactly one route by which a figure gets onto these pages: it is taken from the manufacturer that published it, credited where it appears, and left in the unit that manufacturer chose. Three consequences of that follow us everywhere. A stated capacity is published in decimal units, so 4 TB is four thousand billion bytes and appears as roughly 3.64 TiB once a machine counts in units of 1024 — two conventions for one count, and we publish the maker's figure in the maker's unit rather than converting it. TBW, MTBF and a warranty term are three separate published quantities and not one of them is a lifespan. And redundancy is described here as what it is — a way of carrying on through a drive failure — because a copy that lives on separate hardware is a different arrangement altogether, and no RAID level substitutes for it.

Where the money comes from

Each "Check price" button here is an affiliate link to Amazon, and a purchase made after following one earns us a commission. What the router, the enclosure or the box of plugs costs you is the same either way.

Knowing that an incentive exists is less useful than knowing which way it leans, so here is the shape of it. Amazon pays a share of the sale, which means a tri-band mesh pack is worth more to us than a reel of patch leads. Three things work against that pull:

• Earnings never decide a sequence. Commission has no part in the order of any shelf on this site. Which reference pays best is not something we look up, and a family is sequenced by price tier and nothing else. Where a five-port unmanaged switch is the right answer, it stands at the top.
• Costly rarely means more useful. Some of what gets recommended here most firmly is among the cheapest on the site — a couple of stranded patch leads of the right category, a load bar that makes a plug crimp cleanly, the thermal pad that stops a drive in a sealed shell throttling itself. And moving one node beside an Ethernet outlet does more for a mesh pack than replacing the pack does.
• Not one place in a ranking is purchasable. Nothing — no fee, no free unit, no arrangement of any other kind — has ever bought a position on this site. If that were ever to alter, the page in question would carry the fact in its own body text, not in a line at the bottom of the site.

What we do not do

Nothing here is sponsored. Nothing here is a "top 10" assembled out of other people's reviews. And nothing is sequenced by what it earns, by how readily a link converts, or by which model happens to be in stock this week.

We also do not sell by specification. A big number makes effective copy and poor advice, and a page built around the largest figure on the box tends to close by recommending the most expensive thing on it. Every verdict here names what it rests on: the specifications, the manuals and the compatibility lists a maker publishes, the standards those figures are defined by, and the weight of what long-term owners consistently report. Where a judgement leans on one of those more than the others, the review says which.

Corrections

Prices move, models get replaced, ranges are renamed, and manufacturers quietly change a controller, a port speed or the recording method inside a drive family without changing the name on the label. If something here is wrong, tell us and we will fix it and say what changed. Every page carries the date it was last reviewed.