You’ll find all the best Wi-Fi boosters and extenders in our roundup. When it comes to extending the range of your wireless connection, Wi-Fi boosters and extenders are the way to go, by taking the signal from your router and sending it out to the furthest reaches of your living space. Where you place your router in your home can also make a big difference – essentially, the closer it is and the less obstruction between you and the router, the better. You may want to check the internet first (rather than blaming the connection) by connecting your laptop, computer or other device directly into the router using an Ethernet cable. Your modem connects you to the rest of the world, but the router connects your devices to the modem and to each other too. It does that by taking data packets from the modem which connects your home to the internet, and broadcasting and receiving them wirelessly. The ethernet cable goes into your wall at one end and the router at the other, and the router becomes a beacon of radio signals which WiFi enabled devices use to connect to the internet. Your router plugs directly into the modem which actually connects your place to the internet. Wifi routers FAQs How do WiFi routers work? There’s no maximum range listed, but the rangeboost plus feature promises to boost coverage by 38 per cent compared to ASUS’ models without it – it delivered good coverage across the flat in our test. On the app, there’s the mobile game mode option to open up more bandwidth and drive down latency while you game on your phone or other mobile device.ĪSUS RangeBoost plus gives extra coverage and parental controls and anti-malware software is included for free too, though given the outlay here you’d be narked if it wasn’t. One of the LAN ports on the back can be designated as your priority gaming port, meaning it automatically gets given more bandwidth space when it’s competing with any other device on your network and ensuring your gaming connection doesn’t slow down. That “ROG” stands for “Republic of Gamers” – that’s ASUS’s line of gaming tech – and this is a heavy-duty gaming optimised router with high-speed ports and a quad-core processor to help you get the jump on your adversaries. That did include sitting in the stairwell of the building trying to download an episode of The Repair Shop. Range is slightly tricky to test against claims as routers tend to avoid giving maximum coverage, but we tested how practical they were by putting the routers at the very extremes of our flat and using devices as far away as possible to mimic different users in different parts of a house. They tend toward the quicker in the part of the country where we tested, north London – one government report in 2020 suggested average speeds in cities were up to 30mb a second faster than rural areas – which is worth taking into account. The kinds of download speeds you can expect vary pretty wildly across the country too. To simulate the kinds of loads which might be placed on them in a busy household, we ran as many internet-connected devices at the same time as we could and checked how well download speeds stood up to the pressure. Over two weeks, we worked our way through each of the products below giving each a six-hour session. More and more routers have more expansive and fine-tunable QoS settings, and if you’ve the time for it, it’s a potentially very powerful tool. Essentially, wifi routers with QoS services can give you the option to prioritise certain devices, whether it’s your gaming rig or the work laptop you need a decent Zoom connection on. One term you might not have seen before is Quality of Service (QoS) customisation. It’s also important to know what kind of security features your wifi router set-up can offer you against hacking and criminal attacks. You want reliability, and you want a guarantee of fast download speeds, and you want a range of signal which covers your whole living space, or at least the option to add boosters to make sure you’re never out of range. The latest wireless standards, for instance, offer ever more bandwidth compared to earlier generations. That box you got when you joined your network provider might be okay, but a more specialised router is likely to have new tech inside which helps make sure you’re getting the best connection speed possible. Switching up your wifi router can be a way of making sure that you’re not cursing the internet gods with any regularity. Since the world went WFH, it’s become even more important to stay online, and even more annoying when we’re not. The raw, piercing fury that descends when your wifi decides it can’t be bothered anymore never gets easier to bear.
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