Still, I saw the biggest boost with the Archer AX21, with whole-home average download speeds that jumped from 268Mbps with the Wi-Fi 5 device to 299Mbps with the Wi-Fi 6 device. In each case, speeds to the Wi-Fi 6 device were slightly faster, which is what you'd expect. One final note: I also made sure to run two completely separate sets of tests with all three routers: one to a Wi-Fi 6 device, and one to an older Wi-Fi 5 device. It's a small difference, but a noticeable one if you're regularly making competitive, split-second decisions while gaming online. Though it did fine, with a very steady average ping of 20.42ms across all tests, and no spikes any higher than 26ms, both the Archer AX21 and the RT-AX55 did better, with average ping rates of 18.23 and 17.40ms, respectively. I'd also nudge Netgear aside if you're a gamer or anyone else especially concerned with latency, or the amount of time it takes the router to transmit data to a given server and receive a response. Wi-FI 6E: Here's the difference in three minutes The three are very close in terms of performance, and arguably within the margin of error of one another, but the slight performance boost at range is what gives TP-Link the edge. Even so, it was TP-Link that finished ever-so-slightly ahead in that back bathroom, with an average upload speed of about 17Mbps, which is more than twice as high as the Netgear or Asus average. Still, it's a lot better than the band-steering on other routers I've tested, including the Linksys MR7350, which often got tripped up and left me on 2.4GHz for entire rounds of tests as I moved through my house.Äownloads aside, it was Netgear that notched the fastest uploads of the three, with a whole-home average of about 196Mbps, slightly ahead of TP-Link's 188Mbps and an average of 170Mbps from Asus. That includes a triple-digit back bathroom average of 103Mbps, so the band-steering feature was likely kicking me over to 2.4GHz in that room unnecessarily. That was the case here - the R6700AX's 5GHz band finished with whole-home average download speeds of 298Mbps, which was about 35Mbps better than what I saw with band-steering turned on. In each case, the feature is turned on by default, so that's what I used to compile my averages, but in a small home like mine where range isn't much of an issue, you may very well see better performance by turning it off and sticking to the 5GHz band. Something else worth noting: Like Asus and TP-Link, the Netgear R6700AX offers a band-steering feature called Smart Connect that combines the 2.4 and 5GHz bands into a single network and automatically "steers" your device between them as needed. The Netgear R6700AX (red) finished with average ping around 20ms and no spikes higher than 26ms, but both the TP-Link Archer AX21 (blue) and the Asus RT-AX55 (yellow) did better. This graph charts the latency results of each router I tested across all of my speed tests. Both are better suited for small-to-medium sized homes like mine than for larger living spaces, but if you're picking between the two based on performance alone, I'd lean towards the AX21 for slightly better range. The connection was still stable and usable, with no drops or stalls, so Netgear gets a passing grade here, but note that the TP-Link Archer AX21 performed better, with a back bathroom average right around 100Mbps and a near-perfect overall average of 299Mbps. That said, speeds fell all the way to 45Mbps in my back bathroom, the farthest spot from the router. The R6700AX did well here, with overall average download speeds of about 264Mbps throughout my entire home. The bulk of my tests consisted of tracking the router's speeds throughout five different spots in my house, starting in the same room as the router and working back to the opposite end of the house, where a lot of routers struggle to maintain a strong signal. In this case, I tested the R6700AX against the TP-Link Archer AX21 and the Asus RT-AX55, two other budget-minded AX1800 routers with similar specs to what Netgear's offering.
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