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.
The commonest motive: the supplied box does not hand over control.
A better equipped router saves an extra switch.
The stated device count becomes the main criterion in a busy household.
| What you want | What you look at | What is not enough |
|---|---|---|
| Settings | The stated features | The radio class |
| Sockets | The port count | Wi-Fi |
| Coverage | Another aisle | A single router |
| Throughput | What the line supplies | The router’s page |
A router nobody ever opens accumulates firmware debt. It is the only appliance in the home permanently exposed from outside, and also the one most often forgotten.
This site publishes stated specifications and replaces no security configuration.
Wi-Fi 6 · AX3000 = 2402 + 574 Mbit/s · 1 WAN + 4 LAN Gigabit · one USB 3.0 · four external antennas · VPN server and client
A Wi-Fi 6 router whose Amazon.com listing gives the two band rates, four antennas and a VPN server and client, and leaves the ports and the USB socket to TP-Link's own page.
Best for: A home with four wired devices and a drive or printer to hang off the USB socket.
≈ $75
Wi-Fi 6 · AX3000 = 2402 + 574 Mbit/s · 160 MHz and 1024-QAM · 1 WAN + 3 LAN Gigabit · WireGuard, OpenVPN, IPsec, PPTP and L2TP server and client
A Wi-Fi 6 router whose Amazon.com listing splits its AX3000 badge into two band rates, counts four Gigabit ports and names five VPN protocols, as server and client.
Best for: A household that wants a VPN server or client on the router itself and three wired devices, on a connection of up to a gigabit.
≈ $50
Wi-Fi 6 · 802.11ax named · AX1800, broken out as 1200 and 574 · two bands, 6 GHz excluded in writing · port count not published · no USB · four high-gain antennas and an FEM chipset · OpenVPN and PPTP server
The only router on this shelf that states in writing that it has no 6 GHz band, breaks its class figure into the two radios that make it, and names its VPN server by protocol — and never counts its Ethernet sockets.
Best for: A household that wants Wi-Fi 6 and a VPN server, and will find out the socket count from the photograph.
≈ $55
Wi-Fi 6 · IEEE designation not published · AX3000, 3 Gbps, two bands · four streams · four 1G Ethernet ports · USB 3.0 · 1.7 GHz quad-core processor · 160 MHz channels · built-in VPN, no protocol named
A four-stream AX3000 router whose Amazon.com listing names its 1.7 GHz quad-core processor, its 160 MHz channels and a USB 3.0 socket, and never says which VPN it runs.
Best for: A busy household wanting a router that will not stumble under load, with a drive left on the USB socket.
≈ $113
AC1200 over 867 + 300 Mbit/s · two bands · four Gigabit ports · four 6 dBi antennas · 1 GHz processor · WPA2-PSK
A dual-band AC1200 router whose Amazon.com listing publishes both band rates, four Gigabit ports, four 6 dBi antennas and a 1 GHz processor, and stops at WPA2.
Best for: A small home on a connection under 500 Mbit/s with a few wired devices, where the price matters more than Wi-Fi 6.
≈ $36
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.
For homes that: A home with four wired devices and a drive or printer to hang off the USB socket.
Main advantage: Publishes the two band rates, so the badge can be checked against them
Main shortcoming: The Amazon.com listing counts no port at all; the wired side has to be read on TP-Link's page
For homes that: A household that wants a VPN server or client on the router itself and three wired devices, on a connection of up to a gigabit.
Main advantage: Splits the AX3000 badge into its two band rates, so the 24 Mbit/s of rounding is visible on the page
Main shortcoming: No antenna count or gain on the Amazon.com listing, on a router whose bullets lean on coverage
For homes that: A household that wants Wi-Fi 6 and a VPN server, and will find out the socket count from the photograph.
Main advantage: The only listing on this shelf that states in writing that it has no 6 GHz band, which is the mistake this shelf most invites
Main shortcoming: No Ethernet socket is counted anywhere, on a device whose third job is handing out wired sockets
For homes that: A busy household wanting a router that will not stumble under load, with a drive left on the USB socket.
Main advantage: Publishes its processor — a 1.7 GHz quad-core — the most detailed chip description among the routers here
Main shortcoming: The built-in VPN is named in the title and never specified — no protocol and no client-or-server distinction
For homes that: A small home on a connection under 500 Mbit/s with a few wired devices, where the price matters more than Wi-Fi 6.
Main advantage: Publishes both band rates, so the 33 Mbit/s of rounding in the badge can be checked
Main shortcoming: Wi-Fi 5, not Wi-Fi 6: no OFDMA, and no WPA3 on the listing
Box against box, where the comparison is already on the site.
The hardware listed is taken from the catalog of this site. Specifications are the ones the manufacturer states and the ones on the Amazon page; prices are the Keepa reading for the date shown, and both change. Ranking follows declared specifications, stated strengths against stated limits, and price. Nothing here has been racked or benchmarked by us, and no page claims it has.
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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.
