Important Features You Must Have
When we are going to buy a router, it is not only necessary to look closely at the hardware, but also at the software. For this reason, within the five most important characteristics that it must have, it is essential to have software functionalities, since they make the difference between some manufacturers and others.
Wi-Fi 6 with 160MHz channel width
The Wi-Fi 6 standard it is one of the most important features if you plan to buy a new router. This standard will provide us with greater theoretical and real speed, greater coverage, and above all, we will notice less latency in the connection thanks to the use of OFDMA and MU-MIMO in the two frequency bands. If you have the budget to buy a wifi 6e routeryou will have at your disposal a 6GHz frequency band available, so as not to have any type of interference with other wireless networks.
It is very important that you check if the router allows you to have 160MHz of channel width in the 5GHz and 6GHz bandIn this way, with the same number of antennas we can achieve double the real speed of the connection. Nowadays, new smartphones, tablets and also laptops support this feature, essential to achieve real speeds of more than 1Gbps via WiFi.
2.5G port for Internet WAN
If you plan to hire high Internet speeds, it is very important that your router has one 2.5G Multigigabit port for Internet WANIn this way, we will not have a bottleneck when operators start to launch 2Gbps fiber optic modalities. Right now in Spain the connections go from 1Gbps to 10Gbps from some operators, however, soon we will also have intermediate speeds.
If you have the possibility buy a router with a 5G port and even 10G Multigigabitmuch better, although in the short term this will not be necessary, and right now these routers are quite expensive.
2.5G Multigigabit port or higher in LAN
In order to squeeze the maximum speed of Wi-Fi 6 or Wi-Fi 6E in our router, it is very important that we have a 2.5G Multigigabit or higher port on the local LAN network. In this way, if we have a NAS server at home or are thinking of buying it, we will be able to exchange large files at a speed over 300MB/s real, ideal to take as little time as possible to do this.
Today there are several models from the manufacturer ASUS or NETGEAR that have Multigigabit ports for the LAN, which are perfect for making the most of the Internet connection, although generally we will only use this on the local network.
Wi-Fi mesh support
All router manufacturers are releasing new firmwares that support WiFi Mesh, this means that we can install several routers in the same local network and they will communicate with each other to have WiFi roaming between nodes, band-steering and centralized management of the entire Mesh network. . Manufacturers like AVM with their FRITZ! Box and ASUS with the AiMesh are doing a great job in this regard, and they have router models that support all these features that we have mentioned before.
There are models like the ASUS that allow us to configure the operation of the WiFi Mesh in detail, although we generally have few options.
advanced firmware
The firmware is one of the great forgotten when we go to buy a wireless router. It is essential to know what advanced configuration options we have available, and it is that some features such as QoS to prioritize gaming devices, bandwidth limiter, guest WiFi, the possibility of having a complete antimalware in the firmware at the network level, and even having VPN servers is something that we consider very important.
Of course, you should also check if the manufacturer updates the firmware on a regular basis, or if there are few router firmware updates. Updates are very important, because they not only fix failures or bugs, but also add new features.
