Test and review of 4 Wi-Fi 6 routers: Who's the fastest?
One of the most anticipated features of Wi-Fi 6 wireless routers is improved throughput over their Wi-Fi 5 predecessors, and we wanted to check whether they deliver.
Four vendors – Extreme, Cisco, EnGenius and Meraki (owned by Cisco) – provided access points (AP) for our test. Since the routers support both Wi-Fi 5 (802.11ac) and Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax), we tested them against two Wi-Fi 5 and two Wi-Fi 6 clients and recorded the average throughput and the peak throughput during one-minute tests.
The results give a sense of the performance boost you might expect by upgrading to Wi-Fi 6, and the Wi-Fi 5 number is important because some Wi-Fi 5 clients are likely to be in use for a while after upgrading to Wi-Fi 6 APs.