Phones, tablets, PCs, and smart home tech is a lot of fun but all of it needs great Wi-Fi to work its very best. It can be tempting to do nothing and stick with the disappointing one-size-fits-all solution provided by your service provider but as your needs (and speeds) continue to climb as you add more tech to your life, you'll want a Wi-Fi system that can keep up.
Rather than putting an RGB monster with eight antennas in your living room, you can get a clean-looking, high-performing mesh Wi-Fi system that performs just as well in day-to-day use.
I'm going to start with a little tech explanation to help you understand the numbers the products plaster all over their headlines. First and foremost is the speed rating. This is two letters and a number such as AX3000. The letters stand for the generation of tech being used with AX referring to Wi-Fi 6 and AC referring to Wi-Fi 5. Faster is obviously better but there's a point of diminishing returns and it's probably a lot lower than you think. Wi-Fi 6 (AX) is beneficial to gamers and those looking for top download speeds on modern devices.
One last thing to remember about mesh Wi-Fi speeds is that they need to share their connection between your devices and the connection to the other mesh nodes. For this reason, you'll often want to skew your choice a little higher than you would with a single standalone router.
Unless you plan to upgrade your internet speed, you should pick a router that fits the speed of your plan. Check your bill to see how fast your connection should be. Your provider may list it in slightly different units but just keep in mind that 1000Kbps is roughly equal to 1Mbps and 1000Mbps is roughly equal to 1Gbps. I'll be using Mbps in these recommendations.
Internet speeds 400Mbps or lower
Unless you're working from home or are a gamer, you might not need internet speeds over 500Mbps at all. For these people, an AC1200 mesh kit like the Deco S4 could be the perfect fit. It's a Wi-Fi 5 kit meaning that it uses an older generation of Wi-Fi but it should still have more than enough power for anything from social media apps to 4K video streaming.
There are some other strong picks in this category such as Google Wifi and Nest Wifi which also have some Cyber Monday discounts available. Google Wifi has nearly identical hardware specifications to the Deco S4 but some people will prefer to use Google's software, especially if they already have
Internet speeds 500Mbps+
Each of these three mesh kits should technically be able to deliver gigabit speeds but from my testing, I found they often fell a little short of that mark in a congested area. That's not to say these won't work with a gigabit connection, but you may be leaving performance on the table with these mesh kits.
The Gryphon Tower is a bit of an outlier here as a Wi-Fi 5 mesh but it's a tri-band system with a dedicated 1.7Gbps backhaul to connect the mesh. That leaves an 867Mbps band for devices. If you're interested in Gryphon's parental control and security features but don't want to splurge on the Wi-Fi 6 model, the Tower is still a good pick.
TP-Link Deco X55 and eero 6+ are very similar in terms of hardware with an AX3000 connection featuring 160MHz support. That boosts the 5GHz band to 2402Mbps leaving plenty of room for a fast internet connection and the device you're using. In my eero 6+ review, I found the performance to be very strong and to provide great performance for the price.
Internet speeds 1000Mbps (gigabit)
A fast internet connection is only half of the story. A mesh kit needs to be able to form a strong connection between all of the nodes in the kit to work properly. With slower connections, there's more than enough headroom to keep up the speed but at gigabit speeds, these routers are limited by physics and congestion. There are multiple channels for these routers to use but as time has progressed, they've grown more crowded, especially somewhere like an apartment building.
These mesh routers are all tri-band which gives these mesh systems a little extra headroom to keep up with your connection. As I saw in my Gryphon AX review and my Deco XE75 review, each of these mesh kits can deliver the majority of your gigabit connection speed, even in a congested area.
Internet speeds 1000Mbps+
Multiple fiber and cable internet providers are upgrading their equipment to enable internet speeds over 1000Mbps. While many routers have speeds over 1000Mbps, they need to have a multi-gigabit Ethernet port around the back to hook up to your modem. Each of these routers has a 2.5GbE port for up to a 2.5Gbps connection. If you've been thinking about upgrading your connection but don't have the hardware, these are some strong picks without breaking the bank. As I saw in my TP-Link Deco X90 review, this mesh kit clears this with standard Wi-Fi 6 and does a great job.
In my eero Pro 6E review, I wasn't thrilled by the lack of controls but found the over performance and reliability to be high. My main issue was the inability to use the 6GHz band as I pleased with most devices preferring 5GHz. This won't be a problem for most users. It's also worth noting very similar 6GHz performance with the Nest Wifi Pro.
The ZenWiFi ET8 faired a bit better thanks to ASUS allowing you to completely customize how your bands are configured. This allowed me to actually test and use the 6GHz band on this Wi-Fi 6E kit, which is important given that the ET8 reserves a massive 4804Mbps of its total 6600Mbps for 6GHz. The 1201Mbps connection at 5GHz should have plenty of speed for gigabit speeds if you use the 6GHz band for backhaul.
