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The pandemic kicked off a massive , and it doesn’t look like it’ll be coming down anytime soon. Between , , and , it’s more important than ever to have a fast and reliable internet connection. That might have you looking for a home networking upgrade — and one of the best ways to improve the quality of your home’s connection is by upgrading to a mesh router.
With multiple devices spread throughout your home, a mesh router is like a team of routers that can relay your wireless traffic back to the modem better than a traditional router, especially when you’re connecting at range. They’re especially good fits for large or multi-story homes where your Wi-Fi network has a lot of ground that it needs to cover, but they can help boost speeds at range in small- or medium-sized homes, too. And there are lots of new, next-gen options on the market, so it’s a good time to make the switch.
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Netgear Orbi AX6000
At a retail price of $699 for a two-pack, the AX6000 version of the Netgear Orbi is too expensive to recommend outright — but if you just want one of the fastest mesh routers money can buy, look no further.
With full support for Wi-Fi 6 and a second 5GHz band that serves as a dedicated backhaul connection for the router and its satellites, the powerful system was downright impressive in our tests, with top speeds of nearly 900Mbps at close range in our lab. That’s one of the fastest numbers we’ve ever seen from a mesh router in that test, and it only fell to 666Mbps at a distance of 75 feet — which is still faster than we saw from the Nest Wifi up close, just 5 feet away.
Things got even more impressive when we took the Orbi AX6000 home to test its performance in a real-world setting. With an incoming internet connection of 300Mbps serving as a speed limit, the system returned average speeds throughout the whole home of 289Mbps to Wi-Fi 5 devices and 367Mbps to Wi-Fi 6 devices, including speeds at the farthest point from the router that were 95% as fast as when connecting up close. That’s an outstanding result, and it’s held up as I’ve continued my controlled mesh router speed tests. In the two years that have passed since I first tested the Orbi AX6000 at my home, no other system I’ve tested has been able to take its top spot on the leaderboard, not even that adds in support for Wi-Fi 6E (yes, really).
Again, the problem is the price: $699 is simply too expensive for most folks, especially given that you’ll need a connection of at least 500Mbps in order to notice much of a difference between this system and others we like that cost less than half as much.
There’s also the . It’s still a tri-band Wi-Fi router that supports Wi-Fi 6, but you don’t get the multigig WAN port that comes with the AX6000 model here. We’ll keep an eye on that one and update this space once we’ve tested it out.
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Amazon
Eero was an early pioneer of the mesh networking approach, and in 2019, it got . Then, in 2020, we got two new versions of the Eero mesh router: the and , both of which add in support for — you guessed it — Wi-Fi 6.
I liked the Eero Pro 6 as an upgrade pick, but the standard Eero 6 wasn’t quite strong enough for me to recommend it. Flash forward to 2022, and the release of the Eero 6 Plus. With a list price of $299 for a three-pack, it offers the same strong pitch as the Eero 6 — a relatively affordable and easy-to-use three-piece Wi-Fi 6 mesh setup, complete with a built-in Zigbee radio for connecting things like lights and locks with your network. Best of all, with a faster AX3000 design (up from AX1800 with the Eero 6) and support for full-width, 160MHz channels (up from 80MHz), the performance is significantly improved.
In my at-home tests, the Eero 6 Plus returned average download speeds that were in the top 10 of the 30 or so mesh routers I’ve reviewed here — and none of the systems that outperformed it offer as good a value. Its upload speeds were strong as well, and it works great with previous-gen, Wi-Fi 5 client devices, too — that’s important, because gadgets like those still comprise the majority of Wi-Fi devices in our homes. With three mesh devices for $299 and range of up to 4,500 square feet, it’s an excellent pick for large homes, where that additional extender will really come in handy.
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CNET
Several years ago, became a breakout hit thanks to its easy setup and its ability to spread a fast, reliable Wi-Fi connection throughout your home for all of your connected devices. Now, there’s the Nest Wifi, a second-gen follow-up that adds in faster internet speeds and a better-looking design, plus Google Assistant smart speakers built into each satellite extender.
Nest Wifi debuted at $269 for a 2-pack with the main router and one range-extending satellite, but now there’s a new, third-gen follow-up called that adds in support for Wi-Fi 6E. We’ll be testing that system soon — but in the meantime, the second-gen Nest Wifi is still a very solid system that costs a lot less than before, down to $149 for a 2-pack if you buy direct from Google.
On average, the Nest Wifi notched the fastest top speeds that I saw in my tests from any Wi-Fi 5 mesh router (and faster speeds than some of the Wi-Fi 6 systems I’ve tested, too). Plus, the two-piece setup offered enough signal strength to provide sufficient coverage at the 5,800-square-foot . It also aced our mesh tests, never once dropping my connection as I moved about my home running speed tests, and I never caught it routing my connection through the extender when connecting directly to the router was faster, either.
Make no mistake, the lack of Wi-Fi 6 support means that the second-gen Nest Wifi is a somewhat dated system at this point, but it does include support for modern features like WPA3 security, device grouping and prioritization, and 4×4 MU-MIMO connections that offer faster aggregate speeds for devices like the that can use multiple Wi-Fi antennas at once. It’s also fully backward-compatible with previous-gen Google Wifi setups, which is a smart touch. All of it is easy to set up, easy to use and easy to rely on. Among dual-band mesh routers, I’d much rather have a top-of-the-line Wi-Fi 5 system than an entry-level Wi-Fi 6 system, and even among new competition, the Nest Wifi mesh router fits that bill.
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Tyler Lizenby/CNET
It isn’t quite as fast as the AX6000 version of the Netgear Orbi listed above, but the Editors’ Choice Award-winning Asus ZenWiFi AX (model number XT8) came awfully close — and at $400 or less for a two-piece system, it’s a lot easier to afford.
In fact, the ZenWiFi AX offers the same multigig WAN ports as the Orbi AX6000, which is a great piece of future-proofing that you don’t always get in this price range. The tri-band build means that it also boasts the same dedicated backhaul band to help keep the system transmissions separate from your network traffic, and it offers the same ease of setup, the same steady mesh performance, and the same strong speeds at range, too. All of that makes it a future-ready upgrade pick at a fair price. It even comes in your choice of white .
I also appreciated the depth of control in the Asus app, which lets you manage your network and customize that backhaul as you see fit. If $400 is a bit too much for your budget, know that there’s a smaller version of this system called the . It isn’t as high-powered and it isn’t a tri-band system like its big brother, but it comes with three devices that all support Wi-Fi 6 for $250, which makes it pretty interesting. There was also a new dual-band ZenWiFi system last year called the — it performed quite well in our tests, but it only costs slightly less than the XT8. Between the three of them, the XT8 is the one I’d be looking to buy first.
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The AC1200 version of Netgear Orbi is a smaller, simpler version of the popular mesh system. It doesn’t offer blazing-fast speeds, but the performance is consistent, and it costs a whole lot less than other, fancier Orbi builds.
Netgear brought the cost down by sticking with Wi-Fi 5, ditching the built-in Alexa speaker that comes with the and skipping the tri-band approach and the dedicated 5GHz backhaul band that other Orbi systems use to connect each device in the mesh. I wonder if Netgear missed an opportunity by not branding this system as “Orbi Lite.”
It all makes for a less robust mesh system than other Orbi setups, but I hardly noticed in my tests. Among the Wi-Fi 5 systems I’ve tested, the dual-band Netgear Orbi actually notched the fastest top speeds at close range, it kept up with the Nest and Eero in our real-world speed tests and it offered excellent signal strength in the large-sized .
Netgear’s app isn’t as clean or intuitive as Nest’s or Eero’s, and the network didn’t seem quite as steady as those two as it steered me from band to band in my tests, but those are quibbles at this price. If you just want something affordable — perhaps to tide you over until you’re ready to make the upgrade to Wi-Fi 6 or Wi-Fi 6E — then the most budget-friendly Netgear Orbi definitely deserves your consideration.
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With a fiber internet connection of 300Mbps in my home, these are room-by-room average download speeds for each mesh router I’ve tested with a Wi-Fi 6 client device. The Netgear Orbi AX6000 is our top performer, but the TP-Link Deco W7200 is right behind it and costs less than a third as much.
Ry Crist/CNET
At-home speed tests
Router manufacturers make a lot of big claims about top speeds, or at least confusing when you’re shopping for a new one. I’m more interested in knowing the ins and outs of how they’ll perform in people’s homes, where incoming speeds might be limited and multiple devices might be competing for bandwidth.
To find out, I test all of the routers I review out of my home, a one-story, 1,300-square-foot house in Louisville, Kentucky, with incoming fiber internet speeds of 300Mbps, upload and download. Up until 2020, I ran the majority of these at-home tests using a Dell XPS 13 laptop that uses Wi-Fi 5. Then, once Wi-Fi 6 became available, I started running two separate sets of tests: one to measure speeds to that Wi-Fi 5 laptop, and another, separate set of tests to measure speeds to a client device that supports Wi-Fi 6. That means that there are some routers listed in this post that were tested before we were able to run our at-home tests to a Wi-Fi 6 device (I’ve starred them in the leaderboard graph below).
After running countless speed tests in multiple spots throughout my home, where I have fiber internet with upload and download speeds of 300Mbps, I average the results together to get these aggregate speed ratings for each mesh router I test. Here’s the leaderboard as it currently stands. (Routers with stars were tested with a Wi-Fi 5 client device, before we were using Wi-Fi 6 devices for our at-home tests.)
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The biggest names that are still waiting for Wi-Fi 6 speed test data are the Nest Wifi mesh router and the Asus ZenWiFi XT8, both of which performed well when I tested them with my old Wi-Fi 5 laptop. The latter is a tri-band router with support for Wi-Fi 6, so it would likely be a spot or two higher on that leaderboard (and potentially higher than the dual-band ZenWiFi XD6) if we had tested it with a Wi-Fi 6 device.
I’ll update this post when I’m able to add those results, and I’ll also continue to run tests on both types of client devices in order to get a good sense of how well these routers perform with both current- and previous-gen hardware. You can check out my full reviews for more information on that breakdown.
The short version is that newer client devices that support Wi-Fi 6 will typically be able to hit sustained speeds that are noticeably faster than what you’ll get with older, Wi-Fi 5 devices — but previous-gen devices like those can still benefit from a mesh router that supports Wi-Fi 6.