Together with my trusty laptop in hand, I moved out of the living area where the router is located into the adjoining kitchen, then a hallway bathroom, then my bedroom, and a bathroom in the very back of the home. For those old enough to recall, MU-MIMO is just as radical as Ethernet switching was 20 years back. In each area, I conducted multiple speed evaluations and logged the results. Like changing, MU-MIMO moves media from the older shared-access, one-at-a-time model to a more capable system where several devices can speak simultaneously.

Then, I repeated the procedure in reverse, connecting in the rear bathroom and then working my way to the living area. You weren’t again when Ethernet switching took root? Then imagine moving from a single-lane country street to a significant superhighway.

Eventually, I repeated the whole process during evening hours and averaged everything together. In any event, it’s a big boost in ability. Speeds in my home fall off a cliff in that that back bathroom, the living room in the router. To see how well the Linksys EA-7500 implements the newest technologies, I quantified performance in our upstairs analysis — the room in our home with the worst Wi-Fi coverage, and thus a tough place to measure rate. Sure enough, my typical rates plummeted in that rear bathroom, the farthest room from the router.

My evaluation apparatus was an iPhone 6 Plus (non-S, but more than 2 years old, so a fantastic candidate to test explicit beamforming). The overall average across all evaluations was roughly 60Mbps, but that’s overselling it. Installation was really easy. Upload rates where generally in the single digits, and in most cases, my connection would drop after a couple of minutes in the room. After plugging everything in (the Linksys device involves a four-port Ethernet switch for wired devices) and powering up, I configured the Linksys router through a Web interface.

In the worst of my four test runs, the average download speed in that back bathroom was only 15Mbps. After downloading and installing a firmware update, it took me less than 3 minutes to wake up and running. You’ll want a steady connection of at least 20Mbps in order to stream video and surf the net comfortably. The goal in our performance evaluations was to compare transfer rates involving an old 802.11n access stage. Make that 50Mbps if you want to flow in 4K. The brand new Linksys EA7500 router.

Same goes for video calls best wifi extender, where you’ll also want sturdy upload rates to match. First, though, a word of caution. 11 ways to make your Wi-Fi faster.

Anytime you visit over-the-air Wi-Fi performance numbers, including those I’m going to talk about, proceed with caution. If that back bathroom were, say, a rear office, I’d be miserable. Over-the-air testing is highly variable, with many outside factors that affect results — other Wi-Fi apparatus, other non Wi-Fi apparatus, the sort of building structure, and even sunspots can affect results. That introduced a clear assignment for my evaluation extenders. The very best advice would be to deal with Wi-Fi performance evaluation results with a healthy dose of doubt, and use these as guidelines rather than absolute predictors of their performance you can expect in your environment. Which one could offer the biggest, steadiest boost to rates in the rear half of my property?

With an older 802.11n access point without beamforming, my iPhone downloaded information at about 25Mbps. To find out, I moved every extender in one at a time and paired with my router, connected my laptop with their extension networks, and repeated my speed tests. Download rates were pretty consistent across several trials. I placed them at the hallway, halfway between the spots where I examine in the hallway bathroom and the master bedroom, and near the border of where I’m able to find a strong signal from the router. This time, downloads went far faster — approximately 58Mbps, again really frequently across several trials. A good extender should be able to get a solid signal from the router in that space, then beam wifiblast review out its signal farther than the network could originally extend.

And that’s nowhere near the limit for the EA-7500; in this case, our home cable modem shirts out in 60Mbps. None of the plug range extenders I analyzed managed to strike blazing fast speeds — however, the TP-Link and D-Link managed to sustain speeds in the rear part of my home which are easily fast enough for streaming HD video or making FaceTime and Zoom calls. With a bigger Internet pipe, 802.11ac apparatus with MU-MIMO can go far quicker.

In the long run, each one was able to maintain my link in that back bathroom without dropping mepersonally, but only TP-Link and D-Link wifiblast review managed to sustain upload and download rates which were fast enough to get complete online usage. In spite of the above caveats in mind, move rates improved by a better than 2x factor. TP-Link’s 5GHz band was the most powerful overall, with an average back bathroom download speed of about 75Mbps and an average upload speed only above 50Mbps.