Your home’s Wi-Fi router is the gateway to the internet and your devices. It affects every aspect of your online life.. “The router is the heart of your home network,” said Gianmarco Chumbe, CNET’s lab engineer who leads router testing. “Just like the heart pumps oxygen and nutrients everywhere it’s needed, your router pumps data to all of your devices. And just as a bad heart can affect your whole health, a bad router can ruin the internet experience in your home.”. This story is part of Crossing the Broadband Divide, CNET’s coverage of how the country is working toward making broadband access universal.. Most of us know the feeling. According to a new CNET survey, 86% of Americans experience Wi-Fi drops at some point, and 19% say drops happen always, daily or frequently.. If you’ve spent any time looking at routers over the past two years, you’ve probably seen a lot about Wi-Fi 7. As always with tech products, there’s a lot of jargon to wade through, and it’s hard to tell what’s marketing and what will actually improve your internet experience. Is Wi-Fi 7 really that much better than the Wi-Fi 5, 6 and 6E generations of routers?. The Netgear Nighthawk RS700S was the fastest Wi-Fi 7 router in our lab tests, and the fastest overall. Gianmarco Chumbe/CNET. Key takeaways. Avoid the dual-band trap: If a Wi-Fi 7 router says “dual-band,” keep shopping. Our lab data proves that only tri-band models offer the massive performance gains and access to the 6GHz frequency needed to justify an upgrade.. Future-proof your home network: With the average American household’s data consumption skyrocketing, investing in a tri-band Wi-Fi 7 router is the most reliable way to safeguard your internet speeds for the next decade. You don’t need to spend $600 for top-tier speeds anymore: While high-end models still exist, our tests of over 30 routers reveal that prices have dropped significantly. You can now get a lightning-fast Wi-Fi 7 router for less than $200.. TP-Link dominates the value category: Thanks to their unbeatable balance of price and raw throughput, TP-Link models completely dominated our lab tests and best list rankings.. Throughput: Wi-Fi 7 routers really are faster. Are Wi-Fi 7 routers faster than previous generations? The short answer is yes. Wi-Fi 7 routers recorded the highest total throughput scores by far: 3,169Mbps across all three bands combined, compared to 1,309 Mbps for Wi-Fi 6E routers.. That wasn’t entirely surprising — the buzz around Wi-Fi 7 has been focused on the addition of the ultrawide 6GHz band — but it was eye-opening to see that mirrored so starkly in our test results. Wi-Fi 6E supports the 6GHz band, too, but Wi-Fi 7 is still miles ahead in speed. Why such a large gap in performance?. “Wi-Fi 7 introduces several key upgrades that set it apart from tri-band Wi-Fi 6E routers,” David Coleman, director of wireless networking at Extreme Networks, told me in an email. “For example, Wi-Fi 7 supports 320MHz-wide channels — double the
