Slow Wi-Fi is more frustrating than no Wi-Fi at all. Often, the culprit is a single router trying to cover a large area of your home. One solution is a mesh networking system, which distributes multiple access points throughout your home to improve Wi-Fi range and performance.
After spending hundreds of hours evaluating and testing over 125 Wi-Fi mesh networking systems in home and lab environments over the past five years, we’re confident that the Eero 6 system is the best fit for most people who need a mesh router.
Top Picks
The Eero 6 delivers stable Wi-Fi even on crowded networks, outperforming more expensive options, and it’s also much easier to set up than more complicated systems.
The Eero 6 provides lag-free Wi-Fi throughout your home, takes just minutes to set up, is easy (and relatively cheap) to upgrade, and can be managed remotely from a phone app. If you just want reliable Wi-Fi, you can set it and forget it.
Our tests showed that it could easily stream multiple 4K videos simultaneously and was more than capable of handling our family’s growing collection of smart devices.
runner-up
Velop Micro Mesh 6 sets up quickly out of the box and provides fast, reliable Wi-Fi.
The Velop Micro Mesh 6 ships ready to go, which is definitely a time saver. It’s a great choice for people who don’t want to mess around with Wi-Fi settings through apps and websites (though you can easily change the settings later if you need to). Alongside our top pick, it’s one of the cheapest mesh networks, performing well in all of our performance tests.
Choose your upgrade
The Deco BE63 is significantly faster than our top pick and offers more Ethernet connections, so we recommend it if you have a gigabit (1,000 Mbps or higher) internet service plan or if you already have a lot of smart home devices.
The TP-Link Deco BE63 is recommended if you currently have a gigabit or higher speed internet connection or are planning to upgrade. It’s worth the extra cost if you already have dozens of tech devices installed, like cameras, laptops, tablets, and smart TVs, and you want a powerful mesh network to handle all your video streams. It’s the upgrade choice for anyone who needs Wi-Fi 7 technology for the fastest connections now and for years to come.
Recommended for those on a budget
The TP-Link Deco S4 performed better than mesh networks that cost hundreds of dollars more, and it’s our choice for an inexpensive way to share a Wi-Fi network across a large living space.
TP-Link’s Deco S4 will send a stable Wi-Fi 5 signal to dozens of devices in a large home, but it doesn’t have the top speeds or flexibility of other products. It’s best suited for those with broadband internet service of 500 megabits or less, and if you have more than 50 devices on your network (which becomes increasingly likely as you add smart home products in addition to phones, laptops, and streaming boxes), the S4 is likely to become overloaded.
