![]() ![]() At this point, I disconnect from the router and reconnect while still in that back bathroom. I finish in my home's back bathroom - that dreaded dead zone I mentioned earlier. I continue these tests in three more spots throughout my home, each one at a greater distance from the router. I record the upload, download and latency results in a spreadsheet, then I move a little further from the router into my kitchen, where I run another series of tests. Then, I run multiple speed tests on Ookla, one of our top-recommended speed-testing sites. I begin by connecting in the living room, just a few feet away from the router. (Routers with stars next to their names were tested before Wi-Fi 6, with a Wi-Fi 5 client device).įrom there, it's time to start the speed tests, which I run on a Lenovo ThinkPad laptop that supports Wi-Fi 6. Getting this data together is a multiday process for each router I test - and in 2022, I'll be retesting many of these models on a gigabit network with faster top speeds. This graph shows the overall average upload and download speeds of each mesh router I've tested at home on a 300Mbps fiber network. Throughout all of it, I always maintain consistent network settings, and I make sure to position the router in the same spot in my living room, which sits at the front of my home - your router's specific position and the obstructions surrounding it will make a noticeable impact in the quality of your connection. That gives me a good sense of what the router offers and how easy it is to set up and use, as well as other practical considerations like the level of encryption offered for your network and the number of spare Ethernet ports for plugging in things like media streamers and smart home hubs. With every router I test, I start by setting it up at my home and playing around with the various features and settings. To account for that, I've been busy retesting previous top picks to generate fresh data that I can compare new models against. That's a recent change from previous years, when I was testing on a connection with matching upload and download speeds of 300Mbps. That's helped make it a workable living lab for testing routers and range extenders.Īs for speed, my home's AT&T fiber plan is a gigabit-level connection that caps my uploads at 880Mbps and my downloads at 940Mbps. A 1,300-square-foot shotgun-style house in Louisville, Kentucky, my place isn't the ideal spot for testing connection speeds at long range, but it's long and skinny enough to have a stubborn dead zone in the back that a lot of routers struggle to reach. I first started reviewing routers for CNET in 2019 - a little over a year later, life as we knew it screeched to a halt, forcing millions of us to make the best of working remotely, out of our homes.įortunately, I had already begun developing a process for testing routers at my home. ![]() Testing routers in the work-from-home era Who says your home's back bathroom can't double as a test lab? If you're interested in hearing about how those tests actually work, keep reading. ![]() You can find the full rundown of those results in my lists of the best routers, the best mesh routers and the best range extenders of the year. Putting that coverage together means spending countless hours with each router we review, and we run hundreds of controlled speed tests to give you a thorough look at how each of them stacks up in terms of performance.
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