Collection: Wireless Routers

First decide whether you actually want a router

A router does three jobs at once: it terminates the internet connection, routes and firewalls traffic, and broadcasts Wi-Fi. That combination suits a single office, a small branch or a home worker. Once a site needs coverage across several rooms or floors, the better pattern is a separate gateway or firewall, a switch, and two or more wireless access points placed where people sit. One router pushed to maximum power does not cover a floor the way three access points at low power do, and it gives you a single point of failure for routing as well as Wi-Fi.

Wi-Fi standard, and what each generation changes

Wi-Fi 5 (802.11ac) remains serviceable for light use and is the cheapest route to dual-band. Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax) is the sensible baseline for a working office: its gain is in handling many devices at once rather than raw single-device speed, which is exactly the problem a busy office has. Wi-Fi 6E adds the 6 GHz band. Wi-Fi 7 (802.11be) adds wider channels and Multi-Link Operation, letting a client use two bands simultaneously. A handful of Wi-Fi 4 (802.11n) models remain here for basic single-band jobs such as a till, a sensor or a spare unit.

Single-band, dual-band and tri-band

Single-band units use 2.4 GHz only — longer range, more congestion, lower throughput. Dual-band adds 5 GHz and is the normal choice. Tri-band adds 6 GHz, which is fast and almost empty but travels less far and through fewer walls, so it changes where the router has to sit rather than removing the question.

The headline Mbit/s figure is the sum of every radio

Ratings in this range run from 300 Mbit/s to 19,000 Mbit/s. That larger number is every band added together under laboratory conditions, and no single laptop or phone will ever see it. Use it to rank models against each other, not as a speed anyone will measure.

Check the wired ports before the wireless rating

This is the most common and most expensive mistake. A router with a Fast Ethernet WAN port caps the whole site at 100 Mbit/s no matter what the Wi-Fi is rated at. If the line is faster than 100 Mbit/s, the router needs Gigabit at minimum; for connections above 1 Gbit/s, specify a 2.5G or 10G WAN port. Several models here offer 2.5G, Multi-Gigabit and 10G precisely because the wired side became the bottleneck.

4G and 5G routers

Models with a SIM card slot — MikroTik's Chateau range, Huawei B535, TP-Link Archer 4G and 5G, ASUS 4G-AC86U, Zyxel LTE3301 — take a mobile data connection instead of, or alongside, a fixed line. They suit sites with no broadband, temporary offices, construction and events, and failover where an outage is costly. Check the cellular category the model supports as well as its Wi-Fi rating: the mobile side will usually be the limiting factor. Portable, battery or USB-powered units such as the Acer Connect and NETGEAR Nighthawk mobile routers are built for travel and hot-desking rather than fixed installation.

Managed ranges

TP-Link Omada and Ubiquiti UniFi routers adopt into the same controller as those vendors' switches and access points, so one interface covers the whole site. MikroTik's RouterOS is far more configurable than most and correspondingly less forgiving. If a site already runs one of these ecosystems, staying inside it saves more administrative time than any feature on the box.

Brands

ASUS, TP-Link and Mercusys, MikroTik, Ubiquiti, NETGEAR, Huawei, Zyxel and Acer.

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