Replace the router and put fast wifi in every corner of the house for reliable work, video calls and movies

Last modified on Thursday, December 9, 2021 06.18 EST

Wi-Fi is more important than ever. It can keep your home work and online entertainment running normally. Now it may be time to eliminate those annoying "non-hot spots" and upgrade your router to get your broadband anywhere in your home. All work normally.

Now most of the new devices, from laptops and mobile phones to TVs and streaming media boxes, support wifi 6. I tested several of the latest mid-range "mesh" routers to see which ones are available.

These mesh systems work by replacing your current wifi. One of the units is connected to the current router of your Internet Service Provider (ISP) via a cable, and then wirelessly connected to other units scattered in your home, covering it with powerful wifi.

There are two main types of mesh routers. The cheaper "dual frequency" system uses the same frequency as your phone, computer, and other devices to connect to each other.

In the test, the dual-band wifi 6 mesh system provided good coverage, but it did not significantly increase the speed of the entire family compared to the old, cheaper wifi 5 equivalent. If your broadband speed is lower than 200Mbps, I suggest you spend less on the older wifi 5 kit instead of the new dual-band wifi 6 system.

More expensive "tri-band" systems use separate wifi frequency bands to connect to each other, they are used to connect your device to the Internet, and they can provide significantly faster speeds throughout the home.

If your broadband speed is higher than 200Mbps, here are the three best tri-band wifi 6 mesh systems available. Each device was tested with 400Mbps broadband and more than 50 devices were connected, including Apple MacBook Air, iPhone 13 Pro and Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra with wifi 6, as well as Microsoft Xbox Series X with wifi 5 and Amazon Fire HD 10 Plus tablet, each device is used to test speed and range.

Suggested retail price: £399-£300-350 (two packs)

Linksys Velop's tall white tower did better than any other test on two things: high signal strength at long distances and high-speed signals from each satellite.

The mid-range MX4200 version with three nodes completely covers the house and provides a reliable signal about 25 meters from the house at the end of the garden-something that no one else can do.

Everything remains stable under high load, multiple devices are streaming and downloading at the same time, while the speed and latency remain consistent throughout the family. The speed of Wifi 6 matches the speed of using Ethernet on the host. The ping time remains below 12 milliseconds-only 3 milliseconds slower than through the cable-and only a few megabits are dropped on the limbs of the house, which is very impressive profound. The speed of the wifi 5 device is also excellent, and it is always kept within 100Mbps on the wifi 6 device of the whole house.

The Linksys Wifi app on your phone is responsible for setting up the system, which can then be used to remotely manage your network when you are away. The app is a bit slow and does not display the wifi version or speed of the connected device. More advanced settings also need to access the web interface of the system through a browser.

Each unit is the same, in addition to the ISP router socket, there are three Gigabit Ethernet sockets and a USB3.0 port.

Velop covers most of the router's functions, including guest access options, port forwarding, speed testing, firewalls, automatic updates, device or video call priority to cope with slower connections and other bits. However, it does not have a built-in VPN and can connect to your home network when you are away.

Parental control allows you to suspend Internet access manually or on a schedule, and block specific sites on a device-by-device basis. Velop also supports Apple HomeKit to improve the security of certain smart home devices.

Suggested retail price: £629.99-Special price £450-550 (three packs)

Netgear's mid-range Orbi system follows Linksys, which provides very fast wifi 6 speed and low latency of the host, and the speed of the limbs of the house is slightly slower. Its wifi 5 performance is slightly worse than that of Linksys, and its range is shorter, and it cannot provide a usable connection at the end of the garden. It is also difficult to signal through concrete block walls.

The host has three Gigabit Ethernet ports and a socket for the modem, while the satellite unit has only two Ethernet ports. The network remains stable under heavy usage, but it is difficult to move between rooms when you move the laptop between Orbi devices, you need to manually disconnect and reconnect to wifi to get the best connection.

The Orbi application is very simple to set up the system. It has more features than Velop, such as a network map of connected devices, but the speed is slower and lacks the wifi version and speed information of each device.

The browser-based web interface has advanced settings, including a built-in VPN that allows you to connect to your home network remotely-it is convenient to protect your privacy when using public wifi and use devices such as smart CCTV cameras when you are away.

Basic parental controls include manually suspending the Internet and blocking certain websites, but for more options, Netgear charges £6.99 a month for "Smart Parental Controls", which includes time limits, schedules, website history and device usage tracking, content filtering And some other bits.

Standard firewall security is free, but Netgear also sells an "Armor" subscription for £85 a year, an active security solution from the network security company Bitdefender that helps stop viruses and other threats. I found it annoying and marked my attempts to configure smart speakers and other devices as threats as threats and blocked them.

Suggested retail price: £599-from £419 (three packs)

Amazon's Eero 6 Pro is one of the simplest tri-band wifi 6 mesh systems, you can choose to log in with an Amazon account.

But the wifi 6 speed is the slowest in the group test. Compared with the use of Ethernet on the host, the speed drops by 10%, and it drops significantly when the limbs of the house are connected. In contrast, the performance of Wifi 5 is also disappointing. Each unit is the same, but each unit has only two Gigabit Ethernet ports, one of which needs to be used to connect to a modem on the host.

The coverage in the house is good, but compared to other concrete block walls, the distance between Eero and the garden is much shorter. I also encountered annoying issues with Sonos speakers and Sky Q set-top boxes, and I needed to replace the faulty Eero and software updates to fix it. The Eero system also interferes with Xbox wireless audio through headphones connected to the gamepad.

There is no advanced interface for controlling Eero, but this application is the most basic application. This includes being able to group connected devices into "profiles" so that you can pause the Internet manually or on a schedule for each profile, and see how much bandwidth they use.

However, parental controls for filtering content, websites and services — some of the best in the industry — require an Eero Secure subscription of £2.99 per month, which also includes data consumption history, virus and ad blocking, and other content.

Eero also includes a built-in Zigbee smart home hub for connecting certain devices directly to Amazon's Alexa without a third-party hub, and supports the upcoming Thread smart home standard.