The Best Mac VPNs of 2018 A virtual private network, or VPN, is one of the best and simplest ways to take control of your privacy online. We did the tests, and these are the best VPNs for your Mac.

Having helped usher in simple-to-use Wi-Fi networking in 2000 with its futuristic-looking AirPort Base Station, Apple has finally confirmed what has been reported since at least late 2016: Its line of AirPort and Time Capsule Wi-Fi gateways is dead. This comes as no surprise, given that the last updates for the AirPort Extreme and Time Capsule models internals came in 2013 (to include the 802.11ac Wave 1 standard), while the compact AirPort Express has remained stuck in 2012.

Apple has, however, embedded recent Wi-Fi technology in the radio systems of its computers, mobile devices, and the Apple TV. And the company will continue to sell out its current inventory and, of course, honor its technical support and warranty obligations.

If you’re an Apple household and your home is already full of Apple base stations, you may be concerned about pivoting away and losing features you rely on, or creating a mixed network of Apple and non-Apple routers. You need not be concerned, because you actually have several options, which we describe below. As for losing out on special features, see our section on why Apple's proprietary base station features are no longer relevant.

(A tip on extending the life of your AirPort base station: If you purchase an AppleCare warranty for a Mac and have bought an AirPort base station of any vintage within the two years prior to the Mac’s purchase date, Apple extends the warranty to the AirPort gear through the duration of the AppleCare warranty. You can wind up with as much as five years of base station warranty that way.)

Drop-in replacement: A Wi-Fi router

Your router choices can come down to whether you want to sweep everything out of the house and start fresh, or you’re looking to replace or extend an existing network. The best cheap routers have effectively the same features and networking philosophy as the Apple base stations. They’re really a combination of an access point (Wi-Fi management), a router (moving packets around a network and to and from the internet), and an ethernet switch to handle devices that only have wired connections or that work best with a gigabit ethernet connection.

If you’re using or planning to use two or more of this kind of “old-style” gateway, they should be connected via ethernet. (See below why WDS or similar wireless systems aren’t reliable and reduce performance.)

Mentioned in this article

Mesh networks, described in the next section, work like gateways, but some lack ethernet switches entirely, and they have extremely robust connections among each other.

This is where your budget comes to the fore: It’s easy to drop $300 to $500 on a great, new, multi-router mesh Wi-Fi solution that fills every nook and cranny in a house and never needs to be poked. But you can also spend as little as $100 for a single gateway that could work nearly or completely as well in a more modest single-floor house, apartment, or condo.

For a single or multiple old-style router network, the Netgear R6700 Nighthawk AC1750($100) offers nearly everything you need in a drop-in AirPort Extreme replacement. You can swap out an AirPort base station and swap this in, and you might not notice the difference. It’s also a good choice for multiple units, due to its cost, or you could find Wi-Fi extenders, which connect via ethernet and are used just to fill out coverage.

The R6700 has a USB 3.0 port for hard-drive sharing, a USB 2.0 port for printer sharing, and a four-port gigabit ethernet LAN switch. A drive attached via the router can be used with ReadyDLNA, which allows streaming media from the drive to certain gaming systems and TVs. Unlike Apple’s base station, the Netgear router allows for QoS (Quality of Service) prioritization, letting you elevate audio and video streaming above other data, which improves playback. The R6700 can set up a separate guest-access network.

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The one proviso here is that we haven’t reviewed the R6700 yet, though it’s received excellent marks from customers and was the previous budget pick by the New York Times’ product review site, Wirecutter. Our sister publication PCWorld has, however, reviewed favorably the Nighthawk R7000, which has a similar feature set, potentially faster throughput, and better speed at a distance. But it costs about $145.

Mesh networks: The new hotness

The alternative to the AirPort-style routers, both cheap and expensive, is a mesh networking system. Mesh networks don’t require configuration on each device to get them to find each other, and they don’t require an ethernet cable. Rather, mesh devices—called nodes—self-configure, making the optimum connection for routing data among themselves. The best systems help you place routers for best performance around your house or office, too. (For more information, read my in-depth explanation.)

Mesh nodes manage this with multiple radios, devoting one radio to communicating among other nodes, and with proprietary networking systems for node communication. On the Wi-Fi side, it’s all standard and all Wi-Fi devices connect as expected. The use of proprietary intra-node communication means that you can’t mix and match nodes from different manufacturers.

Mesh networking systems usually offer help through an app or visual signals (like an LED) about where to place nodes optimally for coverage. If you decide you need more coverage (or, in some cases, better throughput), you can just add more units, and the system reconfigures itself to accommodate them. Some mesh systems rely entirely on a smartphone app, available for iOS and Android, leaving out web-based or desktop app configuration, but others have both smartphone and web app options.

We’ve recently picked our top Wi-Fi systems, all of which are mesh:

• Netgear Orbi received our top marks. For $300 you can buy two nodes, a Router, and full-sized Satellite, each of which has ethernet LAN ports (3 and 4, respectively). Or, for the same price, get a bundle with the Router model and two smaller satellites, which have an integral AC power plug but no ethernet ports.

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• Linksys Velop offers better throughput through its radio design. For $340, a two-node package can blanket many houses; a three-node bundle is $450. The units include two gigabit ethernet jacks under their bases, one of which has to be connected to a broadband modem on one of the nodes.
• TP-Link Deco M5 is our budget pick, with less throughput but only costing $230 for three nodes.

Competition has dropped the prices of some of the leading mesh systems, and it’s likely the price will drop somewhat further, but with our top pick at as little as $100 per node and our budget at about $80 per node, it’s not likely to drop as much as prices have already in the last couple of years.

What about Apple’s proprietary base station features?

From Apple’s introduction of the original AirPort until just a few years ago, its base stations were often the best on the market, even if sometimes the most expensive'. However, for Mac users in particular, the gateways had Apple-specific features you couldn’t get elsewhere.

At one point it included:

• AirPlay audio passthrough (AirPort Express only)
• Easy printer networking
• Network-attached storage (NAS) with AFP (Apple Filing Protocol) and SMB support
• Base station to base station networking (via Wireless Distribution System or WDS)
• Internet access to base station configuration and NAS drives via Back to My Mac
• A network punch-through protocol called NAT-PMP for enabling remote access for applications, like games and servers
• AirPort Utility’s GUI interface
• Automated notification of firmware updates
• Time Machine support built into Time Capsule

Other features found in Apple’s base stations are easy to find in other routers:

• DHCP assignment or “reservation,” offering a permanent local network address to a device on the network
• Separate network names for 2.4GHz and 5GHz Wi-Fi networks
• Guest networking (access to an isolated and protected network for guests)
• Timed and device-based access control

Each of Apple’s advantages has slipped away over the years:

AirPlay audio passthrough. This remained a unique feature of the AirPort Express, which features an S/PDIF-compatible (Sony/Philips Digital Interface Format) analog/digital combination 3.5mm port. Plug in a regular analog cable, and you get analog out. Use a Mini TOSlink cable, and it carries digital information over an optical link to an S/PDIF port in a receiver. Apple TV models used to include a similar port, which was removed in the fourth-generation model. (I wrote an article about extracting the audio from the newest Apple TV, and reviewed a high-end HDMI audio splitter/passthrough device, which is still available at Amazon and some other retailers.) Some receivers and other devices include AirPlay, and you can use Rogue Amoeba’s Airfoil to create AirPlay and similar destinations. (See “The 10 must-have utilities for macOS Sierra,” for more on Airfoil.)

Printer sharing. Even quite inexpensive printers now include Wi-Fi networking, allowing a completely cable-free connection. Microsoft office 2019 for mac 16.18 vl. And most Wi-Fi routers include USB-based printer support that’s compatible with macOS (although not always with iOS).

Network-attached storage. Apple’s attached drive support used to be a big deal when OS X was oriented around AFP, and it was difficult to create networked fileservers except Mac OS X Server or personal filesharing in regular OS X. Apple shifted to SMB for network filesharing, which makes it easier to work with Windows-compatible servers. Standalone NAS drives have significantly better features and performance, and are available at all sorts of prices, not just for caviar budgets. Cloud-based storage and sync services reduce the need for network servers. And streaming and on-demand services have replaced some of the purpose for fileservers that mostly held video. If you still need a router-attached hard drive, most AirPort competitors offer USB-shared drives via SMB.

Base station to base station networking. I used to tout this feature as a great way to work around obstructions like walls and ceilings, and while the WDS that Apple used to make it work was an industry standard, only Apple seemed to have mastered it. But it became less and less reliable over time, even as data rates went up by leaps and bounds. I stopped recommending wireless base station interconnection about four or five years ago, and suggest gigabit ethernet (which can require running cable), powerline networking (which works through unmodified electrical outlets), or a mesh network (explained later) that uses a separate radio for connecting base stations.

Remote configuration and drive access. Back to My Mac (BtMM) was once a great feature, especially for people with Macs in multiple locations. However, it’s not reliable and not robust, where other remote access tools (like TeamViewer) work with aplomb. It’s rare you’d need to change your base station’s configuration outside of its LAN, and remote-drive access can be accomplished in a lot of other ways, including with many standalone NAS devices. The feature requires an iCloud account to function, and I and many users had our base stations work in a semi-useless mode until we removed the iCloud account from the base station’s configuration. From some users’ accounts, the problem remains.

Network punchthrough. NAT-PMP stands for Network Address Translation Port Mapping Protocol. While Apple developed it (in 2005), it wasn’t proprietary: it was submitted as a standard. However, it was barely picked up by any other party. Instead, the computer industry as a whole went for UPnP (Universal Plug and Play). Nearly every base station and networked piece of hardware supports UPnP, as well as multi-platform software like VNC and Plex.

AirPort Utility. Apple has long had a leg up by offering a friendly face for Wi-Fi router configuration, especially compared with the web-based administrative frontends for most other devices. Even as Apple added an iOS version of AirPort Utility, it dropped updates for the Windows flavor, locking users into configuring only from Apple hardware. In recent years, router makers have improved their web apps or added smartphone configuration apps. Some systems have very little a user needs to configure, obviating access to dozens of settings, too.

Firmware update notification. This remains a big divide between Apple’s base stations and the direct routing competition. Very few routers notify you when firmware updates appear, and I can’t find any that even let you sign up for a mailing list specific to your router. Apple provides alerts in macOS, and it’s a one-click operation to download and install. More expensive multi-device “mesh” systems automatically push new software to routers or keep most of the intelligence in the cloud.

Time Capsule. When Apple first released the Time Capsule base station, it seemed like a nifty portmanteau, packing two great features into one box at an affordable price. Over time, Apple boosted capacity substantially. But I haven’t recommended the Time Capsule for years, because the integral drive can’t be removed or managed. If Time Machine backup goes awry in a Time Capsule, your only option is to wipe the entire drive. If the Time Capsule dies, you have to crack open a case not intended to be open, extract the drive, and put it in another enclosure. While I don’t recommend Time Machine by itself, either, using a drive attached to a Mac for networked backups gives you much better alternatives. Or you might already be using a cloud-based backup service.

If you still rely on some of the above features, notably printer and drive sharing, you don’t have to give them up, though you might have to reconfigure a device or sort out the best way to make changes. For instance, when I started having trouble with an older HP printer connected via USB to an AirPort Extreme, I went through a settings wizard on the printer that had failed to work for me before, and finally got it to join the Wi-Fi network directly.

And unless you plan to dump all your working Apple base stations, you can always keep one or more running in a network for AirPlay audio streaming or printer/drive support if you still need it.

Bottom line

Even with Apple long out of the picture, you’re not missing much. The AirPort base stations unique features have mostly migrated to other devices, and macOS and iOS require less proprietary support than ever before. Mesh is the future, and its cost has dropped into a reasonable range for many households. But old-school routers like the AirPort Extreme continue to be available at affordable prices.

Your guides

• Jim Salter

• Joel Santo Domingo

Mesh-networking kits use multiple access points spread around your house to improve the range and performance of your Wi-Fi, instead of using a single router, and are great for large homes or old apartments or houses with plaster, brick, or concrete walls. After spending over 50 hours testing 12 mesh Wi-Fi networking kits in a large, complicated, multilevel home, we’re confident the Netgear Orbi RBK50 kit is the best mesh router choice for most people.

Our pick

Netgear Orbi RBK50

The Orbi RBK50 is easy to set up, delivers a ton of throughput, and doesn’t have any troubling cloud dependencies.

Buying Options

*At the time of publishing, the price was $300.

Thanks to a dedicated high-bandwidth Wi-Fi connection between the router and the satellite, the Orbi RBK50 kit had among the best throughput and range of the kits we tested. The simple “put the router where the Internet is, put the satellite in the middle of your house” instructions are impossible to screw up, but for the tech-savvy, it is among the very few mesh-networking kits that provide high-end router features, plus it lets you control your local network without an active Internet connection. The two-unit setup means that your laptops or phones spend less time shifting from one access point to another—or, worse, not reconnecting when they should.

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Runner-up

1 Eero + 2 Eero Beacons

Less raw speed than our top mesh-network pick, but it includes well-thought-out family features, an intuitive smartphone app, and more flexible coverage options for really tough buildings.

An Eero kit with one second-generation Eero base station and two Beacons offers roughly similar performance to the Orbi RBK50. We gave Orbi the nod for its slightly easier setup and placement and lack of dependence on the cloud, but if you’ve got a longer or taller house, are more interested in parental control and security filtering features, or just plain like Eero’s looks better, it’s a great mesh-network pick too.

Budget pick

1 Eero + 1 Eero Beacon

Two Beacons are better, but one got the job done in our 3,500 square-foot test house.

Buying Options

*At the time of publishing, the price was $250.

If you’re looking for good, inexpensive Wi-Fi mesh for right now with an eye for possible expansion later, Eero’s smaller kit with one Eero base station and one Beacon costs just a little more than Netgear’s R7000P, our stand-alone router pick. It did an adequate job covering even our 3,500 square-foot, two-floor test house, and will do better yet in a smaller place. And you can add more Beacons later if you need to.

Most people, however, don’t need mesh Wi-Fi. Our testing showed that most people in smallish homes and apartments will be fine with our current router pick.

Everything we recommend

Our pick

Netgear Orbi RBK50

The Orbi RBK50 is easy to set up, delivers a ton of throughput, and doesn’t have any troubling cloud dependencies.

Buying Options

*At the time of publishing, the price was $300.

Runner-up

1 Eero + 2 Eero Beacons

Less raw speed than our top mesh-network pick, but it includes well-thought-out family features, an intuitive smartphone app, and more flexible coverage options for really tough buildings.

Budget pick

1 Eero + 1 Eero Beacon

Two Beacons are better, but one got the job done in our 3,500 square-foot test house.

Buying Options

*At the time of publishing, the price was $250.

The research

Why you should trust us

Jim Salter has professionally tested and deployed wired and wireless networking gear in homes and businesses for the better part of 20 years. He’s also written feature articles on networking and storage for Ars Technica and Opensource.com.

Before joining Wirecutter, Joel Santo Domingo tested and wrote about PCs, networking products, and personal tech at PCMag.com and PC Magazine for more than 17 years. Prior to writing for a living, Joel was an IT tech and sysadmin for small, medium, and large companies.

For this guide to the best mesh routers and network kits, we supplemented our own observations with reviews from SmallNetBuilder and CNET, as well as calls directly to engineers or founders at Netgear, D-Link, TP-Link, Linksys, Plume, and Eero. We also checked Amazon reviews and Reddit threads, and we solicited the opinions of a few other network professionals. Finally, we spent several hours per mesh-network kit testing for throughput, latency, features, and general user experience in a challenging physical environment that cries out for multiple-access-point networking to solve its issues.

Who mesh-networking kits are for

You should consider a mesh-networking kit if you have a house that a single powerful router can’t cover well, such as a medium to large house (above 2,300 square feet or so, depending on the layout), a large apartment or small house with signal-killing interior walls (like lath-and-plaster, brick, or concrete blocks), or one with a very long or tall, narrow plan, like a three-story townhouse. But before you toss everything out and get a mesh-networking kit, you should try moving your router to a central location if you can, because in smaller houses a single router can actually be more effective than mesh networking.

Even one device with a poor connection can bring the quality of the entire network down.

If you already have a good router that you like, and you need just a little more range in part of your house, you could consider adding a wireless extender. However, the quality of those devices varies widely. (Here's our comprehensive guide to wireless extenders.) Finally, if your house is wired for Ethernet, you can run Ethernet cable to inexpensive wireless access points to outperform the best mesh-network kits we cover here, but at a much lower cost. Mesh doesn’t really start to shine until you don’t have wires, don’t want wires, and have lots of trouble spots (or one really big trouble spot) with poor or no coverage.

Typically a mesh kit won’t give you faster speed tests than a really good connection to an 802.11ac router—none of the Wi-Fi mesh kits we tested outperformed our stand-alone router pick, the Netgear R7000P, at short to moderate range. Range, though, is the whole point of mesh. Mesh can offer better coverage in a wider area, which will make your connection feel faster throughout the house because your devices aren’t grabbing at faint wisps of signal. A network with multiple access points, like a mesh, can also sometimes handle a large number of devices (smartphones, tablets, laptops, and so forth) better than a single Wi-Fi router can. Most homes or small businesses won’t have more devices than one good Wi-Fi router can handle, if the devices all have good connections. The trouble is, even one device with a poor connection can bring the quality of the entire network down, as the poorly connected device eats up all of the available airtime, starving the rest. Replacing those poor connections with better ones is what makes mesh shine.

Mesh doesn’t really start to shine until you don’t have wires, don’t want wires, and have lots of trouble spots (or one really big trouble spot) with poor or no coverage.

Some mesh kits offer family-friendly features—such as Eero’s and Deco’s “family pause” and network security filtering—that are generally easier to use than similar features in traditional routers. But the most important thing about mesh-networking kits, for spaces that can’t be covered by a single router, is that they’re designed to work together—the vendor has specifically tuned each unit to establish fast, reliable “backhaul” connections with one another. That’s something you can’t get just by adding another access point or wireless extender to your existing router.

How we picked the best mesh network

In past versions of this guide, we tested absolutely every mesh kit we could find, bar none—but the number of mesh kits out there is growing, and we’re starting to get pickier. In this round, we dropped some of the poorest-performing kits from our first rounds of testing (Luma and AmpliFi) and skipped one that had reviewed particularly poorly elsewhere (Lyra). This left us with 12 kits from seven vendors (Netgear, Linksys, Eero, D-link, Plume, TP-Link, and Google) to test, in a total of 17 actual configurations to find the best Wi-Fi mesh router.

Our goal was to find a sweet spot meeting four main criteria:

• Consistency: We want a network that does what we want it to every time, not just really well most of the time.
• Flexibility: We want to see a mesh-networking kit perform well in multiple deployment strategies, indicating that it does well not only in our test house, but in just about any house.
• Raw performance: Though it’s not the most important feature, we would like to see a nice fast download under good conditions—preferably, at least 100 Mbps.
• Cost: We’re not looking to spend more than about $400 here. Spending more absolutely can produce better results, but most people don’t need to spend that much to get great Wi-Fi.
• Expandability: Ideally, you should be able to add more pieces later to extend and improve coverage even further, if you discover dead spots or if you move to a larger house.

A note on rated speeds

You shouldn’t get too excited about each device’s claimed speed class, such as AC3200 or AC1750. These ratings refer to theoretical maximum ceilings defined in the specifications of wireless protocols. They have less to do with real-world performance than the biggest number on a compact car’s speedometer does. Honestly, it’s even worse than that: Your Civic will at least break 100 mph, but your “AC3200” router won’t ever get close to a single gigabit per second, much less 3.2 Gbps.

Instead of looking at confusing and misleading AC speed ratings, look directly at the real hardware capabilities of the device. These include how many radios the device has, which bands they operate on, and how many MIMO streams each supports.

Mesh-network test environment

For the objective tests—coverage and performance—we set up each kit’s units in a challenging home environment. The two-story, 3,500-square-foot house we used is built into a hillside, and though its top floor opens onto the front yard, its bottom floor opens onto the backyard. What makes this such a tough house to cover adequately is the location of its network closet (where the Internet connection comes in), plus the foundation slab underneath half the top floor. For most of the bottom floor, a straight line to the base unit in the networking closet goes through the foundation slab—and in some cases, through several feet of packed earth underneath it—effectively killing any direct Wi-Fi signal.

Access-point placement is key to any mesh network’s success. After placing the router in the network closet, our 3,500 square-foot, two-story test house offers two placement strategies.

When testing three-piece kits in a “star” topology—multiple satellites all connected directly to the main router—we put one satellite access point in the near corner of the upstairs master bedroom, and the other in the near corner of the kitchen. This is how we initially tested Orbi RBK53, Eero Pro, Eero with two Beacons, Deco M5, Velop, and Google Wifi.

For two-piece kits like Orbi RBK50 and D-Link Covr, we put the satellite in the middle of the top floor on the living room TV cabinet. When we tested the three-piece kits above in multi-hop configuration, we placed the first satellite on the TV cabinet, and the second satellite in the den, directly beneath and connected to the first.

During testing, we disabled the house’s existing wireless network, but we left several rogue signals in the house—including TVs, Roku boxes, and printers. These kept doing their usual useless and noisy things, just as they probably do in your home. The neighbors also kept their Wi-Fi networks going, which left somewhere in the vicinity of 10 to 30 SSIDs visible at any given time on the top floor.

Mesh-network testing methodology

Most network-performance tests you’ll find are conducted with a single laptop, running a tool called iPerf that just tries to move data as fast and simply as it possibly can. We chose instead to measure using real-world HTTP traffic, the same as your computer uses to fetch updates, download files, and browse the Web—as well as modeling an entire network at a busy time in a realistic way, rather than just looking for big numbers. We also did this in the latest version of our standalone router guide. This meant deploying four laptops across both floors of the house:

• A laptop in the far kitchen corner roughly simulates a Skype or Facetime call, by downloading small (64K) chunks of data at a very low rate (1 Mbps). To do well on this test, this laptop needs to get its data very quickly.
• A laptop in the farthest corner of Bedroom 2 simulates an unthrottled HTTP download (think Windows update, or someone downloading music or games) by repeatedly downloading a 1 MB file as fast as it can. This is a big challenge for the rest of the network—if this laptop gets all of the available airtime, the other tests will suffer.
• A laptop in the TV cabinet built into the island in the living room, right next to the real living-room TV, simulates a 4K video stream, by downloading a 1 MB file repeatedly—but limited to 30 Mbps overall (Netflix recommends at least 25 Mbps for a 4K stream). If this laptop can’t get at least 20 to 25 Mbps, that means a real video would be pausing and buffering. Like the download laptop, this also represents a real challenge to the rest of the network.
• A laptop downstairs simulates real human Web browsing, by loading a “webpage” once every 16 seconds. Each “webpage” consists of 16 separate 128 KB files, all requested simultaneously, and we measure latency from the time the requests go out to the time all 16 requests are fulfilled. This is the most important test—it accurately represents the thing that frustrates real users most (slow and inconsistent Web browsing)—and it usually fails before any of the other tests do.

For three-piece kits, we tested in both an upstairs-only “star” topology, and a “multi-hop” or “daisy-chain” topology in kits that support multi-hop. In the star topology, both satellites are upstairs and connect directly to the router; in the multi-hop topology, a downstairs satellite connects to the upstairs satellite, which then connects to the router.

Two-piece kits are placed like multi-hop kits, but without the downstairs satellite. And Plume is different from everything else—with a whopping seven pods as tested, it’s deployed throughout the entire house for literal whole-house Wi-Fi.

Testing mesh in the most difficult spots of an already difficult house makes sure that we find the ones that work best throughout your house, rather than just looking good in the easy spots.

We also tested raw throughput in each of our farthest, most difficult to reach spots. Upstairs, we test in the farthest corner of the most distant bedroom—as far as you can get, with the four walls and two sets of cabinets in the way, from the main router on the top floor. This spot was challenging for the routers in our best router guide to reach, but we expect a mesh kit to handle it with aplomb. Downstairs, we test in either the center of the den (for star deployments with no access point downstairs), or the farthest corner of the downstairs bedroom (for multi-hop deployments with a unit downstairs)—again, as far as we can possibly get from an access point.

Testing mesh kits this way—in the most difficult spots to reach, in an already-difficult house—makes sure that we find the ones that work best throughout your house, rather than just looking good in the easy spots.

In addition to testing for raw throughput and quality of Web browsing, we made sure roaming worked well for our picks by wandering through the house with a laptop set to go “BING!” each time it changed access point or frequency, and made sure to poke through the user interface for each kit thoroughly to look for bugs or frustrating, confusing dialogs.

Our picks for the best mesh-networking kits are below. If you’d like to skip down and read the test results first, you can jump to the Results and analysis section.

The best Wi-Fi mesh kit: Netgear Orbi RBK50

Our pick

Netgear Orbi RBK50

The Orbi RBK50 is easy to set up, delivers a ton of throughput, and doesn’t have any troubling cloud dependencies.

Buying Options

*At the time of publishing, the price was $300.

Netgear’s Orbi RBK50 is the best Wi-Fi mesh kit for most people, because it covers all the bases in the simplest way. It ranked at or near the top of the pack for throughput in every location we tested in all three rounds of testing so far, and getting the best performance out of it required far less of our time and effort than most of the kits we tested. It’s easy to set up and use, it has all the advanced features you might expect in a high-end router, it has plenty of Ethernet ports, and, unlike most mesh kits, it still works without an Internet connection. It’s also one of the only kits we tested with a dedicated backhaul band—one reserved for communication between the router and the satellite unit. Netgear offers Orbi in several configurations from the cheaper, slower RBK30 to the powerful three-piece RBK53; we tested almost all of them, but feel that the original RBK50 offers the best value for the money.

The Orbi kit is one of the few that we can thoroughly recommend to people with patchy, intermittent, or no Internet service.

The Orbi base and satellite both look like small, oddly shaped, white-plastic vases, with a “halo glow” at the top that turns on only when something special is happening. Each is classified as tri-band device, with 2×2 client-facing 5 GHz and 2.4 GHz channels that provide 866 Mbps and 400 Mbps of bandwidth for your devices, and a 4×4, 1733 Mbps 5 GHz backhaul channel used exclusively for communicating with its base router. This adds up to a very respectable chunk of Wi-Fi bandwidth that’s carefully allocated to be just as usable on the satellite as it is on the base.

Ease of setup is a pretty big deal with Wi-Fi mesh, because the placement of the units can be as important as which kit you buy. It might be easy to look at the two Orbi devices versus the three-device kits from other brands and think, “Well, I’m getting less for my money,” but that’s not the case. The fact that the Orbi kit has just two units instead of three, with dead-simple instructions to put the router where the Internet connection is and put the satellite in the middle of the house, will ease the technical anxiety of people who simply want to plug it in and get on with their lives. And as you can see in our testing results, the Orbi kit does more with its two units than most systems can with three, hitting above 130 Mbps in the very furthest reaches of our test house.

If you truly need more hardware—say, you live in a very long house with the Internet connection in the center—you can add another Orbi unit. You can either connect each of your satellites to a centrally located router, or use a multi-hop configuration that connects one satellite to another satellite and that satellite to the router; the Orbis excel in either configuration. When we first tested the Orbi RBK50 in late 2016, it didn’t support multi-hop; the company added it recently, and it works very well. However, we need to stress that very few homes will need a third Orbi unit. In this situation, you’re better off with our runner-up kit.

We ran into this very situation during our long-term testing: Wirecutter editor Andrew Cunningham said, “The Orbi RBK50 kit did a great job covering all three stories plus the basement of our tall, narrow rowhouse, though I did end up buying a second satellite (the RBW30 wall plug) to get a better signal on our roof.” The Orbi setup is generally good at connecting you to the satellite that will give you the best signal, but that doesn’t mean it’s totally foolproof. As Andrew noted, “When moving between floors, I have occasionally encountered connectivity problems, as though my phone or tablet is trying to talk to a distant satellite instead of the one that’s closest. But it’s only happened once or twice in a year and a half, and quickly toggling airplane mode cleared it right up.”

The Orbi RBK50 also keeps technophiles happy by offering four wired gigabit Ethernet ports on each unit; most mesh kits have only one or two ports per access point, and wall plug satellites such Orbi’s RBW30 or Eero’s Beacon don’t have any Ethernet ports at all. Orbi also has a familiar and complete Web UI containing all the technical features that Netgear’s high-end Nighthawk routers have been offering for years, including static routing, advanced port mapping, firewall rules, and backup. It even has MU-MIMO support for the few devices designed for that.

The Orbi kit is one of the few mesh-networking kits that we can thoroughly recommend for people with patchy, intermittent, or no Internet service. All the other kits but D-Link’s lean heavily on cloud services and smartphone apps for installation and configuration, and you can’t set them up without an already-working Internet connection. By contrast, you can (and should) set up your Orbi system with a local Web interface—it works just fine with any Internet connection or even none at all if you just want to use it to run a local network or if you have an Internet outage. If you’re allergic to the cloud for reasons of privacy, security, or even just plain grumpiness, Orbi is the easy pick. Orbi has its own mobile app, or it can use the same Netgear Genie app as other Netgear routers—but you don’t need either, and for the most part you’re better off without them. The Web interface is better.

CNET’s Dong Ngo reviewed the Orbi RBK50 system in October 2016 and came to similar conclusions: It’s easy to set up, it performs well, and it provides good coverage. Tim Higgins at SmallNetBuilder posted a review in November 2016 that includes a complete (and pretty cool) physical teardown.

Flaws but not dealbreakers

Compared with most Wi-Fi devices, the Orbi units are a bit large and odd-looking. Their “alien vase with no flowers in it” design won’t offend delicate sensibilities as badly as the typical bristling-with-antennas router monstrosity, but it’s still not exactly beautiful. You also don’t want to put an Orbi unit anywhere somebody might spill their coffee on it, because the top of each device is largely an open vent—a drink spilled on the Orbi is a drink spilled in the Orbi.

The Orbi base unit and satellite each have a USB 2.0 port, but those ports don’t support sharing hard drives. Currently, the Orbi system supports only sharing USB printers via Netgear’s ReadyShare app.

We’ve seen complaints from a small percentage of Orbi owners who have experienced frequent random disconnects from the Internet, a situation that often requires a hardware reset of the Orbi kit. Amazon reviews are still overwhelmingly positive, but of the 5 percent of customers who have given the system a one-star review at this writing, most of them refer to these disconnects. This problem seems to be a hardware issue that affects only a small percentage of units shipped. If you are experiencing similar problems, however, know that is not normal. You should ask for a return or exchange your Orbi system promptly, before the warranty expires.

Our long-term testers have had minor issues, but they have mostly sorted themselves out. Wirecutter staff writer Thorin Klosowski stated, “I set up my Orbi about a year and a half ago and haven’t touched it since. The automatic firmware updates occasionally caused problems when I first got it, where it’d reboot in the middle of the day, but that doesn’t happen anymore. Even better, I now have internet access in my garage, kitchen, and more importantly, the bathroom, places a traditional router always struggled. One unforeseen downside is my phone will stay connected to the network a little too long when I leave the house, so when I’m sitting in my car on the street it’ll insist I’m connected to Wi-Fi but can’t access the internet.” Wirecutter editor Andrew Cunningham didn’t have any issues with firmware, however, noting, “It was easy to set up the router plus both of the satellites, and the automatic firmware updates have kept them all up-to-date pretty reliably.”

This is all really nitpicking. We like the Orbi kit. It was easy to set up, it worked right out of the box, it kicked butt, and it didn’t ask us to give up any of the features we're used to with techie-oriented routers.

Runner-up mesh Wi-Fi: Eero + 2 Eero Beacons

Runner-up

1 Eero + 2 Eero Beacons

Less raw speed than our top mesh-network pick, but it includes well-thought-out family features, an intuitive smartphone app, and more flexible coverage options for really tough buildings.

If your house has a really challenging size and shape—or you just have a strong preference for their looks—an Eero and two Beacons are a great alternative to Orbi’s two-piece RBK50. Eero was the first consumer mesh-networking kit. The system is physically attractive, technologically flexible, and well-established. It has also improved tremendously since its launch, thanks to new firmware and more powerful second-generation hardware.

In our testing environment, the Eero kit was reliable and easy to set up and use, hitting 85 Mbps throughput at the very farthest reaches of the bottom floor, and closer to 100 Mbps at the far end of the top floor.

Both the Eero (router) and Beacon (plug-in satellite) units have attractive, sleek designs that won’t look out of place in any decor, and the system offers good throughput and range along with serious expandability. It also provides a family-friendly “Internet pause” feature that generated a lot of buzz in its initial advertising campaign, along with new network security features that help keep your devices safe.

Our testing shows that being close to the access point is usually more important than the access point’s raw speed.

Each tri-band Eero base station has two Gigabit Ethernet ports, and the dual-band Beacons are purely wireless. One of the Eero’s Ethernet ports will need to be connected to your modem; the other can be connected to a wired device (or a switch, which you can then plug several wired devices into). The USB port is only for diagnostics.

There’s nothing on the back of a Beacon but the power plug. If you have more than one Beacon, I highly recommend putting a label on each one’s back to identify where they should be plugged in—it makes life easier if they all get unplugged at once, like when you move.Photo: Michael Hession

Each Eero Beacon unit plugs directly into a power outlet. It doesn’t have any wired Ethernet ports for client devices or for backhaul, but it does have a pretty nifty little light-sensing night-light, which can be managed via the Eero app.Photo: Michael Hession

You need at least one full Eero as your router, but it can also act as a satellite access point like the Beacons. You don’t get a night-light, but you do get faster Wi-Fi connections, as well as two Ethernet ports.Photo: Michael Hession

There’s nothing on the back of a Beacon but the power plug. If you have more than one Beacon, I highly recommend putting a label on each one’s back to identify where they should be plugged in—it makes life easier if they all get unplugged at once, like when you move.Photo: Michael Hession

Each Eero Beacon unit plugs directly into a power outlet. It doesn’t have any wired Ethernet ports for client devices or for backhaul, but it does have a pretty nifty little light-sensing night-light, which can be managed via the Eero app.Photo: Michael Hession

You can buy more Eero or Beacon units and adopt them into your existing network, if your place is big enough to justify that. Most people should probably opt for more of the smaller Beacon units rather than fewer of the bigger, more expensive Eero routers. Our testing shows that being close to the access point is usually more important than the access point’s raw speed. On the other hand, if you’ve got wired backhaul available and want to use it, you’ll need Eero base stations—the Beacons don’t have any ports on them.

The Eero kit works very well in multi-hop configurations—when a satellite access point connects to another satellite, rather than directly to the router—which makes it a great choice for longer buildings with the router off on one end. In the past, we recommended against multi-hop configurations, because they decrease throughput. Our revised real-world tests still show some loss of throughput, but they also make it clear that getting your devices closer to an access point is more important than avoiding multi-hop.

Eero’s intuitive app lets you enable an “Internet pause” feature that makes it very easy to shut off Internet access—instantly or on a schedule—to get the attention of unruly kids, spouses, or roommates (or just keep them offline at particular times). The Eero system is extremely well-documented, too, in a style that won’t scare off network novices yet still gives technically minded people all the details they want.

Eero also offers an optional $10/month Eero Plus “Internet filtering” service, which boasts both family and network security filtering. I’m much more reserved about Eero Plus. The entirely DNS-based filtering is a worthwhile layer of security, but it’s only a layer; don’t uninstall your antivirus. Similarly, the “family filter” is likely sufficient to keep an innocent toddler from seeing something she shouldn’t, but it’ll barely slow down a teenager, let alone an adult, determined to see something you don’t want them to.

Eero has continually and significantly improved the quality of its products via firmware and hardware updates since its debut. This makes us feel extra comfortable recommending them, because it’s clear that users won’t simply be abandoned a year or two down the road.

In February 2019, Amazon announced that it acquired Eero, which bodes well for their longevity. We were able to interview an Eero representative on the phone after the acquisition was announced, and they told us that there will be no changes to Eero’s existing privacy policy for now. We’ll track the situation as it develops, as any changes to their privacy policies or subscription model may affect our overall rating.

Budget mesh Wi-Fi pick: Eero + 1 Eero Beacon

Budget pick

1 Eero + 1 Eero Beacon

Two Beacons are better, but one got the job done in our 3,500 square-foot test house.

Buying Options

*At the time of publishing, the price was $250.

There’s not much to say about Eero’s two-piece kit—it’s the same as the three-piece we recommended above, simply with one fewer Beacon. The smaller kit, with one second-generation Eero router and one Beacon, is better suited to smaller spaces and tighter budgets while still providing a step up in range, performance, and ease of use from a stand-alone router or a router plus an extender.

Eero recommends this kit for “a one or two bedroom home,” and our testing backs up this recommendation; Eero with one Beacon will cover most 1,500 square-foot homes excellently, and most 2,500-plus square-foot homes tolerably. It’s better than our stand-alone router pick for homes with large or complicated layouts, plaster or brick walls, or an Internet connection at the far end of the space. It got a decent 45 Mbps connection to the far end of the bottom floor of the house, about three times faster than our stand-alone router pick.

Wirecutter editor Kimber Streams has had good experiences during their long-term testing: “I switched from an old router pick to our budget Eero pick because I couldn’t get any signal in my kitchen, and only an unreliable signal in the bathroom. It’s like magic! It fixed all my problems, and I love that it’s so easy to set up with an app,” Kimber said. “The only issues I’ve encountered were during a couple ISP outages: the app told me that the Eero needed a firmware update to solve the problem, but that wasn’t the problem at all. I was confused and frustrated for about half an hour until the outage passed.”

If a low-end mesh setup suits your space better than a high-end stand-alone router, there are a few three-piece mesh kits that compete with the two-piece Eero kit, particularly TP-Link’s Deco M5. The Deco did slightly outperform the budget Eero kit when in a simple “star” placement, with both satellites connected to the router, but it falls down in multi-hop mode, which suggests that Eero will be a better fit for more houses. We also prefer Eero for most people because it offers a better interface, more features, and the option of expanding to the full three-piece kit (or further!) in the future. Although you can add extra nodes to Deco M5, its degraded performance in multi-hop mode strongly implies they won’t actually help much.

An overview of the test results

The TL;DR

We describe the testing process in detail below, and if you’re curious, you’ll want to look at that to understand how each kit dealt with the challenges of our test house and its simulated busy network. If you want only the overview, the following stacked graphs show aggregate performance for each kit across all of our test locations and workloads.

We believe that mesh’s purpose isn’t to make Wi-Fi fast somewhere, it’s to make Wi-Fi fast everywhere. So we tested throughput only in the two absolute toughest-to-reach spots in the house: the far bedroom on the top floor, and the spot on the bottom floor farthest from an access point. For single-hop and two-piece setups, that’s the den right below the living room; for multi-hop configurations it’s the downstairs bedroom.

As the chart shows, every single mesh kit we tested trounced our stand-alone router pick, the Netgear R7000P, at long range. At close range, the R7000P is as fast or faster than all of the mesh kits’ access points, but having a slower mesh access point nearby is always better than having a faster router that’s far away. That’s why mesh kits beat the stuffing out of any stand-alone router in a large space like ours.

In the above graphs, we look at relatively simple maximum throughput from the absolute toughest-to-reach spots in the house. Upstairs, we test in the far upstairs bedroom, at a site 43 feet and four interior walls away from the router. Downstairs we test in the farthest possible site from an access point. If there are access points upstairs in the far bedroom and the kitchen (for three-piece, single-hop setups), that means our test point downstairs is in the den, right below the living room. If there’s only one satellite access point upstairs on the living room TV island (for two-piece kits), that makes our downstairs test point the farthest corner of the downstairs bedroom.

We tested throughput only in the two absolute toughest-to-reach spots in the house.

We’re testing using real HTTP downloads of a 1 MB test file here. Testing with real HTTP, just like you use when downloading things at home, means we’re testing things you’ll actually benefit from, rather than just getting a big number to wave around excitedly.

We also included a multi-hop only version of the same graph. If you have a long or tall house and your main router is stuck all the way at one end of it, you should only consider kits that perform well in multi-hop deployments.

The long version

These throughput graphs are worthwhile for giving you an idea of your best-case performance when you’re the only one on the network, but they don’t tell the most important story. To do that, we needed to abandon the single-laptop model, and distribute four separate laptops around the house for simultaneous testing, simulating a busy little real-world network; we detailed how we set up the network and what tests we’re running on which laptop above. As a brief recap, we have laptops upstairs simulating a 4K video screen, a VoIP call, and a large-file download, and a laptop downstairs, in the bedroom or den (depending on mesh configuration) attempting to browse the Web.

The Web browsing test is both the most realistic example of your experience actually using the Wi-Fi, and the “canary in the coal mine” that almost always fails before anything else does. By running it in the area of the house farthest from the networking closet (and as far as possible from an access point) we test the worst-case scenario for a mesh networking kit.

Modern webpages consist of a pretty large number of resources that must all be fetched before the page renders in your browser—you need the text and HTML of the main page itself, you need CSS libraries that control how they’re formatted, javascript libraries that control how you interact with them in the browser, images which the page has to arrange itself around, and more.

As a result, what seems like a simple task—click a link, get a webpage—is actually very complex, and a relatively minor number of errors and slowdowns can magnify rapidly into “webpages don’t load and you have to hit refresh.” Our Web browsing test, by more closely simulating what your browser really has to do behind the scenes, exposes those problems more accurately.

For Web browsing, latency—how long it takes between a request and a response—is more important than raw throughput. By looking at the latency of requests made while all four laptops are busy simultaneously, we can get a good measure of how well the network functions during a busy time, instead of when everybody else is asleep and you have the Wi-Fi all to yourself.

By running a Web browsing test as far as possible from an access point we test the worst-case scenario for a mesh networking kit.

The results here diverge significantly from the simple, single-device throughput tests: The two-piece Orbi kits move from the top half of the pack to the bottom, for example, and the kits in a multi-hop configuration rocket to the top. What we’re seeing here is the importance of having client devices closer to an access point. Yes, you sacrifice some throughput, but for well-designed kits, the added reliability is well worth it. The Google Wifi and TP-Link Deco M5 are noticeable exceptions—neither has a particularly robust backhaul connection or manages it particularly well, so the downstairs client benefits very little or not at all from their multi-hop, unlike the Eero, Orbi, and Velop kits.

Because testing Web browsing in the farthest part of the house is so revealing of the quality of a mesh-networking kit, let’s take a deeper look at the latency over a five-minute test run with each kit. We broke this into three charts, from best performers to worst, for ease of reading.

In the three graphs above, we look at the top, middle, and lowest performance groups individually, as measured by the time to load a webpage downstairs during multiclient testing. All four of the top performers are kits in multi-hop configuration; if stuff happening fast when you click is a priority, you want to have an access point nearby.

Rather than just looking at the mean (average) of all results during our five-minute test window, here we look across the spectrum of results, from good to bad. The median—or typical—result is 50th percentile, over on the left. Moving right, the 75th percentile shows you how bad one out of every four clicks will be, and the 99th/100th percentile is the worst result of the five-minute run. If a kit rockets off the chart at the 75th percentile, that means one frustratingly slow page load out of every four. This is a tough test: We’re not modeling an easy time when nobody’s home, we’re modeling a time when several devices are busy doing various things. We think that’s fair, though. A good network should be able to satisfy you all the time.

All four of the top performers are kits in multi-hop configuration. If stuff happening fast when you click is a priority, you want to have an access point nearby.

TP-Link’s Deco M5 was the only kit tested that actually did worse in multi-hop placement than in “star” (all satellites connected directly to the router) placement. Technically, this indicates poor backhaul quality and/or management in the Deco M5 kit. Practically, this means that adding extra M5 access points is unlikely to significantly improve the quality of a Deco M5 network. You can significantly improve an Orbi, Eero, or Plume network by adding another access point in a hard-to-reach spot, but you shouldn’t expect similar gains with M5.

Wired versus Wi-Fi

As exciting as all this new, high-power Wi-Fi tech is, a Wi-Fi network can’t offer anything close to the performance of a wired connection. Even in the absolute best conditions for Wi-Fi, a standard wired connection is in a separate league.

Our wired connection was more than seven times faster than the highest throughput any wireless alternative achieved, at any location, period. No matter what misleading hype you see on the box, Wi-Fi will not outrun Gigabit Ethernet, period.

The picture doesn’t get any prettier when you look at latency. Avid Internet gamers, take note: The absolute best Wi-Fi connection you can manage, with the absolute best Wi-Fi gear you can find, will significantly increase your ping time.

Netgear’s Orbi RBK53 costs more than double what a three-piece set of Ubiquiti UAP-AC-Lite wired access points does—it likely costs more than the access points and the in-wall Ethernet cabling that feeds them. But it comes astonishingly close to their latency values under load. Neither, however, come even remotely close to direct, wired Ethernet connections. You’re looking at a little over four hundred milliseconds improvement, there. To be clear, this isn’t quite the same thing as ping—there’s a significant amount of data (2 MB) being moved inside that window—but even an empty ping is going to be anywhere from 5 to 20 milliseconds better from a wired laptop than one connected to even the most ideal Wi-Fi network.

The message here should be clear: If you really care about maximum performance, you need a wired connection, no matter how good your Wi-Fi gear is.

What about Ubiquiti?

If you’re a more technical sort, you might be wondering how this stuff compares with a more traditional multiple-access-point stack such as Ubiquiti’s UAP line of devices. Unlike the mesh kits we tested, each UAP unit connects to the network through a wired Ethernet port and provides a Wi-Fi signal in its physical area. Technically, this arrangement is a much simpler option than mesh, as you don’t have to worry about a signal to the access points, just the signal each one provides. You also don’t need to worry about broadcast chatter in between the access points, or any of a host of other potential problems; you just plug a unit in (to both power and the wired network) wherever you want some more of that sweet, sweet signal.

If you can run Ethernet cables and use standard access points instead of a mesh kit, you should consider it.

Aside from the Ethernet cabling, the only real downside to Ubiquiti’s UAPs is the need to install the UniFi controller application on a connected computer; PC, Mac, and Linux are all supported, and you’ll need it only for setup. (You’ll still need a router, too, because the UAPs are just access points, but your current router will work fine for this purpose.) UniFi lets you adopt and place all of your UAP access points, see who’s connected to them (and boot them off individually for grins, if you feel like it), and more. It’s not really that hard to use, but it definitely feels techy enough to scare off some less-technical people.

Our test house was already wired for Ethernet, and its Wi-Fi was (and still is) being provided by a trio of Ubiquiti UAP-AC-Lite access points. For these tests, the UAP-AC-Lite access points were in the same sites as our multi-hop configured mesh kits—one in the network closet, one atop the living room TV island, and one downstairs in the den.

The $80 UAP-AC-Lites are pretty close to the top of our charts for throughput, despite being the least expensive version of Ubiquiti’s AP line. They don’t quite take home the gold here, with Orbi’s much more expensive RBK53 kit squeezing out a few Mbps more as tested, but they come close enough you’ll need to squint to tell the difference.

Throughput doesn’t tell the whole story, though. Latency still tends to be a better measure of how your Wi-Fi network feels in the seat of your pants, and in latency the two UAP units beat the Orbi system (and every other mesh kit we tested) everywhere.

Subjectively, you really feel this difference in heavy use. The UAP system delivers a smooth and reliable experience with no frustrating pauses or dropped signals. In our tests, it connected rapidly and transferred data smoothly and consistently. You feel like you’re supposed to be connected to it, as opposed to feeling as if you just managed to connect to it. With that said, the high-end three-piece Orbi’s results here are incredible—we wouldn’t expect them to always perform as close to wired access points as they did here, but getting as close as they did really blew us away.

UAP AC Lite units currently cost about $80 apiece, making our trio about the cost of an Eero with one Beacon. As mentioned earlier, you do need an actual router (wired or wireless) behind them, but we won’t count the cost of that here, because whatever you’re already using will work fine. Even if you add the cost of labor for a professional to run an Ethernet cable from, say, your router to the downstairs office, the total cost is still currently well under $400. Most of the mesh kits are capable of using a wired connection to any or all of their satellites (Orbi being the most notable current exception), but they’re all considerably more expensive than Ubiquiti access points.

Long story short: If you can run Ethernet cables and use standard access points instead of a mesh kit, you should consider it.

What to look forward to

In February 2019, Amazon announced its acquisition of Eero. The companies say there will be no changes to Eero’s existing privacy policy for now, but we’ll track the situation as it develops.

At the CES 2019 trade show, Arris announced its SURFboard mAX Pro Mesh Wi-Fi System and Netgear showed a new Orbi with Wi-Fi 6. Both will be 802.11ax/Wi-Fi 6 compatible, and will be available later this year. We’ll test these networking kits when they’re released.

Plume’s second-generation mesh-networking system will rely on tri-band routers called SuperPods, which appear to be faster and more powerful than the company’s first-generation Plume Pods. But Plume has also significantly changed its pricing structure, which we think will make buying into the Plume system much less appealing, even if the new models are more powerful than their predecessors. In order to purchase any router (including the new SuperPod) from Plume, you must first subscribe to the company’s Adaptive Wi-Fi service. The subscription costs $60 per year, or $200 for a lifetime membership, and unlocks access to reduced pricing on Plume routers. With the subscription you can get a three-pack (which includes two dual-band and one tri-band router) for $39. But if you ever allow the subscription to lapse, don’t expect your routers to work as well as they did before. As The Verge reports, Plume routers can remain functional without a subscription, but will lose access to Plume’s “active management” features. It’s not yet clear how important those features are to the system’s performance. Because most other mesh systems don’t offer and certainly don’t require a subscription to work fully, we’re unlikely to recommend the refreshed Plume system.

In June 2018, TP-Link released its second mesh networking system: the Deco M9 Plus. The M9 uses two modules and promises to cover 4,500 square feet and, thanks to built-in Bluetooth and Zigbee antennas, can also serve as a smart-home hub. In April 2019, TP-Link introduced the Deco M4 mesh networking kit. The dual-band M4 has three nodes, and promises to service a home up to 5,500 square feet. The M4 is compatible with, and can be used to expand existing Deco M9 Plus and M5 mesh networks. We plan to test the Deco M9 and M4 in our next update.

Linksys has announced a cheaper, slower version of the Velop kit we tested and liked in 2017. D-Link also announced new models in its Covr line of routers that support mesh networking. The new entries include a dual-band kit, which uses three units to cover up to 6,000 square feet, and a tri-band kit, which uses two units to cover up to 5,000 square feet. We’ll consider those systems for testing for our next guide update.

Asus released a firmware update called AiMesh that adds support for mesh networking to many of its existing routers, as well as some new ones the company announced at the CES 2018 trade show. The added support produces more routers to complement the company’s Lyra line, which we decided not to test in 2017 after reading several negative reviews. Asus’s Blue Cave standalone router features AiMesh, but it's a bit pricey when you purchase multiple units. Asus has also continued to expand the Lyra line, introducing new offerings such as the Lyra Voice, which functions as both a mesh router and an Alexa speaker.

Netgear has released a similar Alexa-equipped Harman Kardon speaker/satellite combo, the Orbi Voice. You can add the standalone Orbi Voice your existing Orbi mesh network, or purchase it as part of a kit. We’ll consider some of these smart-speaker/mesh–Wi-Fi hybrids for future testing.

Samsung’s SmartThings WiFi is another compact mesh system that also includes a smart-home hub. It’s compatible with Samsung SmartThings switches, sensors, and other smart devices using Zigbee and Z-Wave. It uses Plume’s Wi-Fi management app, and Samsung says it will cover a house up to 4,500 square feet.

We’re also going to test the Synology MR2200ac, a standalone mesh router that is one of the first devices to use the new WPA3 security scheme. As its name suggests, WPA3 is more secure than the current WPA2 standard. The MR2200ac seems pricey on its own, but it’s compatible with and extends the range of the Synology RT2600, our runner-up standalone router pick.

We’re in touch with Zyxel and will review its new mesh kit, Multy X system, later in 2018. The Multy X system looks pretty good on paper, but mesh has gotten to be a much tougher field to break into this year.

The 802.11ax protocol will replace the current 802.11ac protocol the same way ac replaced 802.11n. With 802.11ax, MU-MIMO support will extend to uploads (it currently applies to downloads only). A new feature called OFDMA will allow central scheduling of client device transmissions (which should greatly ease congestion within busy networks). Finally, Spatial Frequency Reuse—or “coloring”—should notably decrease congestion with neighboring networks by allowing your devices and the neighbors’ to transmit even when they can hear one another—as long as they reduce their own transmit power enough to avoid trampling one another when they do. This should be a big, big win for people struggling in crowded apartment complexes and dorms.

In October 2018, the Wi-Fi Alliance, an industry organization responsible for certifying that Wi-Fi devices work together, announced that it is rebranding Wi-Fi 802.11n as Wi-Fi 4, 802.11ac as Wi-Fi 5, and 802.11ax as Wi-Fi 6. We’re hoping the new terminology will help to simplify explanations.

The 802.11ax/Wi-Fi 6 standard won’t be ratified and declared officially until sometime in 2019. Much like the current situation with MU-MIMO, many of its best features won’t work properly unless all (or most, at minimum) of the devices within range of the router also support 802.11ax. This means mainstream 802.11ax support effectively starts sometime in 2021—so if you’re shopping for a router, go ahead and get one of our current picks now instead of trying to hold out.

The competition

Linksys Velop

The Linksys Velop kit is a strong competitor with tri-band access points somewhat similar to the Orbi RBK53 or Eero Pro, but it’s a little too pricey for what you get. Although it didn’t make one of our top slots, it sits firmly atop of the rest of the pack, with good-to-great performance and a solid mobile app.

We weren’t impressed with the Velop kit when it launched, but it’s come a long way since then. It connected quickly and smoothly in our current round of testing, figuring out both “star” topology and “multi-hop” topologies without complaint or issue, and multi-hop performance was fantastic. The problems with the Linksys Connect app that annoyed us at launch have all been resolved.

We still think you can do better for the money with one of our main picks, but with Linksys’ firmware and app improvements, the Velop is a solid system that performs well—especially in multi-hop configurations. It’s great to see Linksys putting in the hard work to improve the product this much.

Plume

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We’ve always been impressed with Plume’s innovative approach to Wi-Fi—its strategy of distributing lots of tiny, cheap access points points throughout the house is simple and easy for all levels of user and all shapes of houses.

People who want a minimalist physical presence and really no-brainer setup might have very reasonably chose the first-generation Plume system, which came in the middle of the pack on our Web browsing latency test. But when the company revealed its second-generation hardware in June 2018, Plume announced that in order to purchase any of its routers, you would have to subscribe to the company’s Adaptive Wi-Fi service. This makes us more inclined to trust our findings from 2017—most people willing to buy and install their own Wi-Fi system can do better for the same amount of money.

Google Wifi

Like the Eero and Velop kits, Google Wifi is an extensible mesh-networking kit with an intuitive app. Google Wifi did okay in our tests last year, but it’s dragging at the bottom of the pack this year. This is partly due to our tougher testing, and partly due to stronger competition—and improved firmware in most of our competitors, which we really didn’t see from Google.

Google Wifi also offers a bunch of extra functionality in its app, in the form of Material Design “cards” (immediately familiar to any Android user) that can assist with everything from device prioritization to managing home-automation devices.
Engadget and CNET both really liked the Google Wifi system back in 2016—but neither reviewer had 2017’s much stronger field of mesh kits to compare it with, neither seem to worry about Google’s history with abandoned projects, and both sites posted their reviews before the Google Accounts hiccup that factory-reset thousands of devices, including mine. We think you can do a lot better.

The rest

Orbi RBK53

Let’s be clear: Netgear’s Orbi RBK53, which is an RBK50 kit with an additional satellite, was phenomenal in our test house. It was also expensive overkill. If you really want top-notch Wi-Fi, or if you have a much larger or more frustratingly laid-out house, it might be worth the money. Most people will be very well served by the much less expensive RBK50, though, and even if you end up wanting more, you can always add an additional RBS50, RBS40, or RBW30 satellite to your existing Orbi kit later—the RBS50 is the same satellite the RBK50 and RBK53 kits use.

Orbi CBK40

The Orbi CBK40 is likely to provide a decent enough mesh Wi-Fi experience for many people. But because the bundle includes a router with a built-in modem we do not recommend it. As we detail in our guide to modems, a modem-and-router combo is a risky investment. If either portion breaks or becomes obsolete, you have to replace the entire thing. That can become expensive. We think you’d be better off plugging the router on our pick into a separate modem, which you shouldn’t have to replace too often.

Best Home Wifi Routers 2018 For Mac

TP-Link Deco M5

TP-Link’s Deco M5 is a three-piece kit of smallish circular access points, each with two wired Ethernet ports. Deco M5 is dependent on the cloud, and must be configured from a mobile app. It performed reasonably well, and it’s the least expensive thing we tested.

With that said, it’s not much less expensive than our budget pick, and it did terrible in multi-hop configuration. If your place is long and narrow, has multiple stories, or you think you might ever want to expand your coverage, M5 isn’t a great fit.

D-Link Covr

D-Link’s new Covr kit really does not impress when unboxed. 2019 office for mac. The kit consists of the company’s 2600R router and 1300S satellite, and they look very much like a cheap, old-school black plastic router and extender.

However, Covr’s performance was much better than its looks, but unfortunately its interface is confusing and in our experience partly broken, and it’s frankly too expensive for what it is.

Eero Pro

The Eero Pro, the fastest and best Eero kit, avoids Beacons entirely, opting instead to include three full-fledged tri-band Eero router units. Most people won’t, and shouldn’t, buy this more-expensive configuration. Yes, it performs better than one Pro with a pair of Beacons; but not enough for most people to justify spending nearly twice as much. (Besides, this way you don’t get the night-lights!)

The best reason to spring for the more-expensive Eero Pro kit is to make use of wired backhaul, if you’ve got a wired network in your place—the Beacons don’t have Ethernet ports, and the Pros do. But if you have wired backhaul, you should take a look at the much cheaper Ubiquiti hardware first.

Orbi RBK40 and RBK30

Netgear’s smaller Orbi kits will beat the pants off a stand-alone router, but they don’t really hit the right price/performance point for most people. The RBK40 is a slightly smaller version of the original RBK50, but has lesser-quality radios in it; the RBK30 has the same router as the RBK40 but uses a smaller access point that plugs directly into a power outlet, similar to (but much less attractive than) Eero Beacon. All routers and satellites in both kits have just 866 Mbps dedicated backhaul channels, half of the RBK50’s 1733 Mbps.

Best Router For Multiple Devices

We don’t really recommend RBK40 or RBK30 in kit form—but if you want to add coverage to an existing RBK50 two-piece Orbi, and don’t want to spring for another full-size RBS-50 satellite, you’ll probably be happy with the smaller, cheaper units. The RBW-30 is the best add-on for most people; it doesn’t have any wired ports, but it costs less than RBS-40 and performs just as well.

AmpliFi HD

The AmpliFi HD system comes from a company with a long pedigree in enterprise mesh networking. Like Eero, AmpliFi HD has a polished and functional smartphone app. This system looked great on paper, but we don’t like its odd satellite design, with easily maladjusted positional antennae, and it never tested very well. We did not retest the AmpliFi for this late 2017 update.

AmpliFi Instant

Like the Amplifi HD, the compact and inexpensive Amplifi Instant has a front-mounted touchscreen that lets you monitor your network bandwidth. It was easy to set up, doesn’t look like a sci-fi movie prop, and is compatible with Amplifi HD routers and mesh satellites. However, it didn’t impress much when we tested it in a small home, underperforming compared with other mesh kits and even our standalone router pick.

Amped Ally

The Ally is a two-piece kit from Amped Wireless, billed as a router-extender combo rather than a true mesh system. In our tests it had fairly consistent range and throughput, and okay latency, but you can’t add extra satellite units, and its networking security features are overhyped. Its official app is also hard to find and has a confusing developer name, making it hard to know if you’re downloading the real thing. Ally was not retested for this late-2017 update.

Luma

Now sold as a two-piece mesh-networking kit, the Luma system was more complicated to set up and less reliable than anything else we’ve tested. In our earlier testing it did not perform well, and its software needed some work to live up to its advertised features. We did not retest the Luma kit for our late-2017 update.

Zyxel Multy X

The two-piece Zyxel Multy X kit has promise. The actual hardware is great, both technically and aesthetically; it’s got top-of-the-charts throughput, a whopping seven Ethernet ports per node, and its low-slung heft sits solidly on a desk or shelf. Unfortunately, it falls apart badly in multiclient testing. We can’t recommend the Multy X system for busy home networks right now.

Footnotes

1. You must connect one port on the base unit to your modem via Ethernet, leaving three ports available on that unit.

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2. Netgear Genie has a “network map” that’s kind of neat and shows you which clients are connected to which Orbi, but it isn’t a necessity. The only feature that requires the Genie app is Netgear’s OpenDNS sort-of integration for content filtering, which isn’t that great: It’s awkward to use, and you can get better filtering by installing free apps directly on your phones, tablets, and computers.

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Sources

1. Dong Ngo, Netgear Orbi Wi-Fi System review, CNET, October 8, 2016

2. Tim Higgins, NETGEAR Orbi Reviewed, SmallNetBuilder, November 1, 2016

3. Dong Ngo, Eero Wi-Fi System review, CNET, February 23, 2016

4. Tim Higgins, eero Home Wi-Fi System Reviewed, SmallNetBuilder, March 16, 2016

5. Dong Ngo, Your router isn’t as fast as you think it is. Here's why, CNET, June 23, 2016

6. Jim Salter, 802.eleventy what? A deep dive into why Wi-Fi kind of sucks, Ars Technica, March 4, 2017

7. Lance Ulanoff, Plume is turbo-charged Wi-Fi on a budget, Mashable, December 13, 2016

8. Dong Ngo, Put one of these Plume pods in each room to blanket your home in Wi-Fi, CNET, December 5, 2016

9. James Trew, Google WiFi review: A hassle-free router comes at a price, Engadget, December 6, 2016

10. Dong Ngo, Google Wifi review: The best way to blanket your entire home with Wi-Fi, CNET, December 6, 2016