Look, I get it. Bad Wi-Fi is one of life’s worst tortures, up there with rush-hour traffic and Comcast customer service. But surely there’s a solution that’s a little more sane than this $400 Linksys router that looks like it wants to rip my head off?
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The new EA9500 has every fun new tech going in Wi-Fi to get you maximum internet-ness. The headline feature is AC5300, a protocol that uses one standard 2.4Ghz channel and two 5Ghz channels to transmit at 5334Mbps. That’s about 600 megabytes of data a second, and well in excess of any residential internet speed that I’m aware of.
There’s also compatability with the new MU-MIMO standard, which is a fancy way of saying that it can establish full-speed connections with multiple users at once. So if you have four laptops simultaneously streaming a couple 4K movies each, your Wi-Fi still won’t grind to a halt.
Oh, and in case one router isn’t enough, it’s designed to nicely handle device handoffs between multiple routers, so you can walk from one end of your mansion to the other.
There’s obvious penalties to having a router this good: it costs $400, looks so aggressive that I think it should ship with a muzzle, and most people’s devices (and internet connections) can’t make the most of the fancy new technology. But hey, anything to get you off your ISP’s default router.