Best Gadgets for the Home: Tech Awards 2022 Editor's Choice (Part 2)

Best Wi-Fi 6 Router

Best Wi-Fi 6 Router

The adoption of Wi-Fi 6 has been swift. Nearly every new smartphone, tablet, and notebook worth buying today supports it. There's even talk of Wi-Fi 6E now. At any rate, Wi-Fi 6 improves overall networking performance in two ways. The first is by increasing data transfer rates by increasing the maximum amount of data that can be carried by each stream. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, it enables routers and compatible devices to communicate with each other simultaneously – something that cannot be done using the older Wi-Fi 5 (802.11ac) technology. Check out this Wi-Fi 6 (Wireless 802.11ax) guide for more details.

However with the worldwide parts shortage and disruption in the supply chain ecosystem, many brands have had very erratic launch schedules since the Covid pandemic began. As such, we've tried our best to match suitable high-end products to ensure we can give a meaningful assessment for the best products in each category.

To make the cut for this year’s awards, we've shortlisted high-end dual-band Wi-Fi 6 routers that were released in the past year and it must be the company’s best offering of its class such as meeting the AX5400 speed rating or higher.

Nominees:

• ASUS RT-AX89X dual-band WiFi 6 router
• D-Link Exo AX AX5400 Wi-Fi 6 router (DIR-X5460)
• Netgear Nighthawk AX5400 Wifi 6 router (RAX50)

And the winner is...

After some extensive comparisons, we found the ASUS RT-AX89X is the winner in this category.

Let’s address the elephant in the room first and that is price. Yes, this is a very expensive router. It costs a lot more than its rivals. However, it backs up its tremendous price tag with an unrivalled feature set. To start, it has a lot of ports. Not only does it have 8 Gigabit Ethernet LAN ports, but it also has a regular Gigabit Ethernet WAN port and two 10Gbps ports that are handy if you subscribe to a 10Gbps fibre plan or have a high-end NAS that supports 10GbE connections. For users living in apartments, support for DFS (dynamic frequency selection) should certainly help alleviate channel congestion. And then there’s ASUS’ AiMesh feature which allows you to create mesh networks using this router and other compatible ASUS routers. It performed decently too and served up respectable wireless speeds across our tested ranges. Lastly, it offered the most polished app interaction as well as an admin console with a plethora of controls.

Overall, because of its combination of performance and features, we felt that it justified its high price tag and was worthy of our Best Wi-Fi 6 Router of the year award.

For more details on how we selected our winners, check out the full reviews and articles listed in the References section below.

References

• ASUS RT-AX89X review
• D-Link Exo AX AX5400 Wi-Fi 6 router (DIR-X5460) review coming soon
• Netgear Nighthawk AX5400 Wifi 6 router (RAX50) review coming soon