Home Wi-Fi

A range extender repeats the router's signal from a socket halfway to the weak spot, so it suits one back bedroom or a garden office. A Deco mesh system replaces the router's single signal with two or more units on one network that hand devices between them, so a phone keeps the same connection from room to room. Where several rooms are weak, mesh is the tidier fix.

With powerline, the house's mains wiring links the router to the far room. The rated speed follows the standard: AV600 on the WPA4220 kits, up to 1000Mbps on the AV1000 PA7017 and WPA7517, and up to 1300Mbps on the PA8010P. For a larger house, the WPA4220 3-unit kit puts Wi-Fi in two rooms from one adapter at the router. Traffic over the wiring is protected by 128-bit AES encryption on the PA7017 and PA8010P.

On a VDSL or ADSL phone line, the Archer VR400 can replace the provider's box, since the modem is built in; it supports VDSL up to profile 17a with G.vector and has four gigabit ports. The Wi-Fi 7 Archer BE230 has a 2.5Gbps WAN port and a 2.5Gbps LAN port, for wired connections above gigabit. The Archer NX200 takes its connection from a 5G nano SIM or, if you prefer, over Ethernet WAN.

Shop routers

An AC1200 router such as the Archer C50 reaches 867Mbps on 5GHz. Wi-Fi 6 lifts that to 1201Mbps on the Archer AX12 and 2402Mbps on the AX55. Wi-Fi 7 adds Multi-Link Operation, so a device can use several bands at once: the dual-band BE230 reaches up to 3600Mbps, and the tri-band BE550 5760Mbps on 6GHz, with 320MHz channels for the devices that can take them.