best cheap router

Tom_nerd · November 22, 2020

I wrote this and though that if anyone ever googles best cheap router they will get some help by reading this:

This document will be structured by price so the further on you read the better signal and quality the router will give although the focus was on price

to performance demonstrated on the graph to the right. All these different routers will get its own section, but there is no clear correlation between price and price to performance, for example the super cheap ones are much better than the expansive ones. Anyway, onto the comparison.

The first one is the TP archer which is the cheapest one in this comparison and to be honest there is nothing else going for it apart from that, it comes in at just £64.99 and is the cheapest dual band router that I could find and is pretty much the same as the stock one, it comes with 4 ethernet ports and the speed is AC 1750 which is beyond slow, I would not recommend this over the stock provided router because it is pretty much the same. So, I would only recommend this if the stock router is malfunctioning then it could be a possible option.

The next is the ASUS RT-AC86U this is the second-best price. It has a top speed of 2167MBPS and again has 4 ethernet ports and is the first and not the last router to feature beamforming technology which in basic is instead of firing the signal everywhere it just sends it towards the device which gives the user basically more signal. And has guest network access so you could give somebody a password and username that only lasts for a set period so that if you want to give the password to somebody but only for a little while, which can help with security and people giving away your Wi-Fi password. It is also rated at AC 2900 and weighs 1.1KG.

The third one is the ASUS RT-AC88U. which is a big jump up from the previous one because although it may only have a speed of 2000MBPS which is 167MBPS slower than the previous one, not many connections can saturate that whole connection and now that number does not really matter it is more down to the amount and size of the antenna’s because that is what means that the Wi-Fi connection can be faster and more secure, another thing to take into consideration is the amount of ethernet ports, and this takes ethernet port problems and throws it out the windows (it is compatible with windows). Because it has a whopping eight ethernet ports which are all gigabit. Also features 128-bit WEP encryption which adds very little extra latency and can be turned off for gaming because that does not need to be encrypted because firstly gaming is not something that can be sold and benefitted data from. And gaming benefits from lower latency which is added by encryption.

The final one is the beast of routers. This is the god of routers because there are basically no downsides, it has a maximum bandwidth of 4808MBPS which will never be a problem in the next 10 years because although it may be a whopping £260 it will last you longer than all the other routers because of its improved bandwidth. It also has eight gigabit ethernet ports. It also is approaching on the enterprise space, so it comes with some extra features like WPA2-enterprise. And has a humongous 4 antennas which will give you Wi-Fi all over the home and takes the lower than full signal bars and disintegrates them.