6 best wifi routers for a blisteringly-fast connection throughout your home

Buy more than one and you’ve got a mesh system going, but even on its own the atlas pro 6 is a sturdy option. It has two bands, to split your demands and keep everything moving at a decent pace. You can have up to 30 devices running at once on the atlas pro 6, and the strength of its signal and the speed of access it gives is genuinely impressive even in the slower parts of our flat.

Don’t expect a lot of under the bonnet tinkering options from the app, which is a little simplistic – though parental controls, advanced security controls and device prioritisation are all available – but for a good all-rounder with the capacity to keep a busy household online there aren’t many better options.

A specialist router to make sure you never end up lagging behind your competitors is a bit of an outlay, but there’s no price you can put on the ability to muller seven-year-olds on FIFA in peace. Netgear’s nighthawk XR1000 is wifi 6 enabled and comes with a gigabit ethernet port and four regular ethernet ports to smooth connection for your console or PC.

Using the Nighthawk app you can quickly and easily find the fastest servers for your game globally, as well as manually allocating more bandwidth to the functions you’re using. Like we say, it is pricey, and Netgear’s armour security system is an extra £84.99 a year on top of the money you pay for the hardware itself. On the other hand, it looks like it could fly out of the Death Star, which is nice.

If you happen to be out in the sticks where internet speeds still aren’t what they might be, an extra emergency booster like the M5 may be the answer. It promises – and delivers – 5G connection wherever you are, with a battery life which should be good for a day out doing what you’re doing even with multiple devices connected.

It’s really simple to set up and use, especially with its touchscreen interface, and the ability to use it as a backup for your usual router is squirrelled away in the settings too. When your wifi is working, the M5 uses that; when it isn’t, the M5 steps in to cover the gap.

There are a couple of things to bear in mind, though. Firstly, as you’ll see, it’s nosebleed-inducingly expensive. Secondly, the expense doesn’t end there, as you need a SIM card to run it off. However, the 13-hour battery life should be enough for most users.

That “ROG” stands for “Republic of Gamers” – that’s ASUS’s line of gaming tech – and this is a heavy-duty gaming optimised router with high-speed ports and a quad-core processor to help you get the jump on your adversaries.

One of the LAN ports on the back can be designated as your priority gaming port, meaning it automatically gets given more bandwidth space when it’s competing with any other device on your network and ensuring your gaming connection doesn’t slow down. On the app, there’s the mobile game mode option to open up more bandwidth and drive down latency while you game on your phone or other mobile device.

ASUS RangeBoost plus gives extra coverage and parental controls and anti-malware software is included for free too, though given the outlay here you’d be narked if it wasn’t. There’s no maximum range listed, but the rangeboost plus feature promises to boost coverage by 38 per cent compared to ASUS’ models without it – it delivered good coverage across the flat in our test.

Despite the spiky-looking design, there’s nothing unwelcoming about the user experience here. It’s dead easy to work with, both straight out of the box and via a raft of easy to follow YouTube tutorials on ASUS’s channel. Most handily of all there’s a straightforward portal to set up visitors to log on simply and quickly, and that nudges it ahead of the competition as a choice for small business owners who want to make their cafe, their waiting room or their bar a better connected place to be. Speeds are reliably fast, and it’s wifi 6 enabled too, meaning you’ll be ready for the next generation of superfast speeds when they roll out across the country. And again, AiProtection is included as standard.

For ages, if you wanted wifi and a voice-activated assistant, you needed two separate devices. The nest, which launched in 2019, brought the two together. It’s a wifi router with a very decent range, and it’s also a smart speaker with built-in Google Assistant. Speed is less important here than security, as family-focused features like the parental lock.

If you like getting under the hood of your wifi and tweaking away, this probably isn’t one for you, but the Google Home app makes actually using the wifi and keeping an eye on what speeds you’re getting – as well as controlling all the bits of your Google-connected smart home – really simple. Plus, the newer nest wifi pro, which launched at the end of October, is a mesh system meaning you can you can add new nest devices to extend the range throughout your home.