Science

These Are the Fastest Routers on Amazon

Meet your gigabit internet's best friends.

WiFi and Wireless Routers have come a long way since the a/b/g days. Decent range, speed, reliability, and features are available to routers even at entry-level price points today, so it’s no longer a super expensive endeavor to outfit your place with wireless internet. That said, WiFi is an evolving technology and speeds continue to get faster, so if you want the fastest speeds available within a router, you’re going to have to pay up and it can add up quick. Here are the fastest routers you can find on Amazon today.

A note on numbers: They’re theoretical. We know you’re all smart cookies and are capable of deducing that if you don’t have gigabit internet, you won’t see gigabit speeds, of course.

ASUS Gaming Router - GT-AC5300

Asus ROG Gaming Router GT-AC5300

Amazon

Asus offers up one of the fastest routers around. It’s more than capable of streaming 4K video, playing VR Games, and just about anything else you could throw at it. The tri-band router offers two 5GHz bands and one 2.4GHz band that can bring collective speeds of 5334 Mbps. If you’re not an intensive internet household, you’ll basically have to try very hard to max this router out. While it may be overkill for some, it would essentially be a way to future-proof your place with a solid wireless experience for quite some time to come.

TP-Link Talon AC5400

TP-Link Tri-band Router - AC5400

Amazon

An absolute powerhouse of a router, the TP-Link Talon AC5400 offers speeds up to, you guessed it, 5400Mbps down. The tri-band router will tear through any content, be it multiple 4K streams, demanding online gaming, and whatever else you could possibly think of. This router is the cheapest of the tri-band routers on this list, but at over $300, it’s still hardly something we would call cheap.

Asus RT-AC86U

ASUS RT-AC86U Dual-Band Router

Amazon

It’s laughable to call this router slow when compared to all of the other options on this list, but it is. The only dual-band router on the list, the 802.11AC MU-MIMO rocking AC86U can provide speeds up to 2900Mbps. If nearly 3GBs is considered slow to you, then sure, it’s not a good fit. But for anyone out there simply looking for a fast router without passing the $300 mark, you’ll be pleased with this router’s performance.

Netgear Nighthawk X10

Netgear Nighthawk X10 Tri-Band Router

Amazon

This is basically the best router, full stop. Netgear’s Nighthawk line has always been the top of it and the X10 is the perfect companion to your gigabit internet, with insane theoretical speeds of 7.2 Gbps (broken into multiple bands of 4600+1733+800 Mbps). While there are plenty of fantastic routers available, you’d be hard pressed to find a better one in terms of performance.