Best Routers for an Apartment

Only if you own devices that speak it, which today means a recent flagship phone or laptop. Wi-Fi 7 routers do handle congestion better even with older clients, so they are a reasonable buy if you are replacing a router you will keep five years. Paying a premium for Wi-Fi 7 to serve a house full of Wi-Fi 5 devices changes nothing you will notice.

Under about 1,500 sq ft on one floor, a good single router beats a cheap mesh, because every mesh hop costs bandwidth. Over that, or across floors or through brick, mesh wins clearly: our far-bedroom measurement roughly doubled when we moved from a single unit to a two-node kit in the same house.

Several makers now put parental controls, network security and even some device management behind a monthly fee. Eero Plus, Netgear Armor and TP-Link HomeShield Pro all work this way. We scored that against them, and marked which routers give you the core features outright.

Each router replaces the last in the same 2,200 sq ft, two-storey house on the same 1 Gbps connection, with the same laptop as the client. We measure in four fixed positions — same room, one floor up, far bedroom, garage — three runs each, then repeat with thirty devices connected and four 4K streams plus a large upload running. We also log every disconnection over a week of normal use.