The Best Wireless Routers of 2017

With the gaggle of connected home products, smart TVs, smartphones, and other mobile devices ruling our lives, it's more important than ever to outfit your home or business with a wireless router that can handle the increased demand for Wi-Fi connectivity. When choosing a new router, you should consider the size of your coverage area and the number of clients, as well as the types of devices that will connect to the router. Granted, not everybody needs the kind of performance that you get with the latest and greatest models, and there's no reason to pay for features that you will likely never use, but if you have several family members vying for bandwidth for things like streaming video and playing Overwatch online, a new router can make a world of difference and help keep the peace. We guide you through choosing a router that will handle your current and future wireless networking needs, and offer our top picks to get you started.

Single- or Dual-Band?

Not all routers are created equal. Some models can only communicate over a single radio band, while others can use two. Single-band routers operate on the 2.4GHz frequency band and are typically the least expensive models out there, but they have to compete with other devices in the home that are on the same radio band, such as microwave ovens, Bluetooth devices, and wireless phones. That said, they are perfectly adequate for things like Web surfing and connecting to social media services like Facebook and Twitter.

If one or more of your devices will be streaming video from a service such as Netflix, or connecting to an online gaming service such as Xbox Live, consider a dual-band router. These have two radios; one connects to the 2.4GHz band, and the other connects to the 5GHz band. The 5GHz band is typically less crowded than the 2.4GHz band and offers more throughput, with minimal signal interference, making it ideal for video streaming and gaming duty. Dual-band routers allow you to assign a band to specific applications and clients, thereby easing the load on both bands.

Then there are tri-band routers. These have three radios—one that operates at 2.4GHz and two that operate at 5GHz. These models are a good fit for multi-device households that experience heavy network traffic via lots of video streaming, torrent downloading, file transfers, and online gaming.