Router upgrade
A provider’s box is chosen for the provider, not for your building. Replacing it is worthwhile for three specific reasons — routing, port speeds and published features — and it is worth nothing at all for the reason it is usually bought, which is to reach a room the old one could not.
Three arrangements are common, and the shopping list differs for each.
Some providers supply an all-in-one: it terminates the line, routes, hands out addresses and runs the radios. Some supply a modem or optical terminal that terminates the line and does nothing else, in which case a router is a missing part rather than an upgrade. And many supply the all-in-one with a setting that turns off its routing so that a router of your own can take over cleanly.
Finding out which you have takes ten minutes in the provider’s documentation, and it prevents the most common bad outcome in this category: two devices routing at once, producing symptoms that look like a hardware fault and are not.
Routing capability. A better route table, better handling of many simultaneous connections, controls over what devices may do, a guest network that is genuinely separated. This is what an under-specified provider box is worst at.
Port speeds. Count the LAN sockets and read their rate. A router advertising multi-gigabit radios behind four gigabit sockets has a wired ceiling that nothing on the radio side raises. If the line arriving is faster than a gigabit, the WAN socket has to be faster than a gigabit too, and that is a separate figure from the LAN ones.
Published features and updates. VPN support, controls, monitoring, and above all the maker’s stated policy on firmware. All of these are readable before purchase, which is more than can be said for most of what gets compared.
It does not buy coverage in a room the old router could not reach, because the obstacle has not moved and the new unit is standing in the same place. It does not make the incoming line faster than the line is. And it does not raise the connection rate of a laptop or a phone that speaks an older wireless amendment — the newer generation waits for newer devices.
If the complaint is one bad room, the money belongs in a second radio placed near the trouble, or in a cable to a better position. If the complaint is that everything is slow including wired devices, nothing on this page is the answer.
Wireless generation and its IEEE designation — 802.11ac, 802.11ax, 802.11be — which is the plain version of the marketing name.
Band plan and stream count. How many radios, on which bands, and whether the unit is 2×2 or 4×4. Whether a 6 GHz radio may be used at all is decided by the regulator where the unit is sold.
WAN and LAN port speeds, and the port count. The most consequential numbers on the sheet, and the least discussed.
USB sockets, if you intend to hang a drive or a printer off the router, along with what the maker says that arrangement actually supports.
The class figure, last, and only as a rough tier indicator. It is legitimate as a description of the product and useless as a description of a link.
Move the radios towards the middle of what they have to cover, even if the line enters at a corner. A single run from the termination point to a central position is often the highest-value cable in a building, and it costs a fraction of the router.
Give the unit height and clearance. A router on a shelf covers a floor better than the same router on the floor behind furniture, and a cupboard costs coverage in proportion to what the cupboard is made of.
Wi-Fi 6 · 2.4 Gbit/s stated, exactly 1800 plus 600 · DSL modem built in · VoIP and DECT · not one Ethernet socket counted
The only router here with a modem and a telephone exchange inside it, and the only one whose headline figure is exactly the sum of the two rates printed beneath it.
Best for: A household on a DSL line that wants the modem, the telephony and the radios in one box rather than three.
≈ 150 €
Wi-Fi 6 · 802.11ax named · AX3000 badge over 2976 Mbit/s published · two bands rated · AiMesh extendable · no socket published
The only router in this group to print an 802.11 designation, and one of the several to leave every Ethernet socket uncounted.
Best for: A household with Wi-Fi 6 clients that intends to add a second mesh-capable unit from the same maker later.
≈ 45 €
Wi-Fi 6 · both band rates published, no badge printed · four Gigabit LAN · one USB 3.0 · four external antennas · no DSL
A router that publishes the two band rates and never prints the badge they add up to, and the only one of these seven with a USB socket.
Best for: A flat of two or three rooms with four wired devices and a drive or printer to hang off the USB socket.
≈ £87 / 65 €
Wi-Fi 6 · AX3000, about 3000 Mbps stated · 160 MHz and 1024-QAM · seven of ten lines unpublished · not one socket counted
A Wi-Fi 6 router that describes its processor down to the core and never mentions a single Ethernet socket.
Best for: A buyer choosing on the radio side and the VPN feature list, who will confirm the socket count with the seller before ordering.
≈ $50 / £43 / 40 €
AC1200 badge over 1167 Mbit/s published · two bands · four Gigabit LAN · four antennas rated 5 dBi in the title and 6 dBi in a bullet · 120 m²
A four-socket dual-band router that publishes both band rates, and gives the same four antennas two different gain figures on the same page.
Best for: A flat of up to about 120 m² with several wired devices, on a connection faster than 100 Mbit/s and slower than a gigabit.
≈ 26 €
It depends what it is. Where it terminates the line as well as routing — a modem or an optical terminal built into the same case — it stays, and the question becomes whether it can be put into a mode where it only carries the line. Where the line is terminated separately, the box can often be removed entirely. The provider’s own documentation is what settles it.
It is the arrangement where the provider’s box routes and your own router routes behind it, so traffic is translated twice. Ordinary browsing rarely notices. What does notice is anything expecting to be reachable from outside — a game, a remote connection to a storage box — and the fix is to put one of the two into a mode where it stops routing.
No. That figure sums the theoretical peak rates of every radio in the unit, calculated from the channel width and stream count the standard defines, and no single connection reaches it. The stream count, the band plan and the port speeds describe the same product in terms that can be compared.
More than most single specifications. A router is the device on your network most exposed to the outside, and what the maker publishes about how long it will issue updates, and how those updates arrive, is a specification like any other. It is also one of the few that can be read before buying.
Every price named in a summary was read on the date that review carries. What a shop asks today is shown beside the product, and it moves.
Routers, drives and enclosures are discounted almost continuously, and a crossed-out price tells you nothing on its own about what the same reference was charged last month. UniverTrack keeps the record of what every retailer has been asking week by week, so a discount is weighed against a price that actually stood rather than one invented for the banner, and it tells you when the moment to buy is genuinely here.
