Tenda A9 N300 Universal Range Extender, Broadband/Wi-Fi Extender, Wi-Fi Booster/Hotspot, Plug and Play, works with all broadband providers, UK Plug

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Naturally, however, connecting devices to an extender via Ethernet won’t be as fast as a direct wired connection to the router because the signal still needs to travel from your router to the extender over the airwaves first. What other features should I look for? The downside of these speeds is that they involve a design that looks more like a small router with a separate power supply. However, this gives you more flexibility than a plug-in unit, helping you to get a better signal, while you can also use this repeater as a Wi-Fi access point. And, just like the Repeater 3000, it’s as simple as anything to set up. The WiFi 6 Repeater 5400 will be overkill for many people, but if you must get a high-speed connection to a distant corner of the house, nothing else out there comes close. It barely kept its cool, hitting a peak of 107 degrees Fahrenheit, despite its array of cooling vents. The E15’s 115-degree Fahrenheit surface temperature was higher though. Tenda A27 review: Features With the ability to cover up to 2,000 square feet, the Tenda A27 did well in my 100-year-old home, pushing the Wi-Fi network into new areas. It was able to move 294.3Mbps with the extender 40 feet from the Asus AXE-11000 router and the Samsung Galaxy Book Pro test system another 10 feet away. That’s about one-third more throughput than the D-Link E15 was capable of but well short of either the TP-Link RE705X’s 528.0Mbps or the Nighthawk EAX80’s 358.0Mbps. The RE450 isn’t the cheapest Wi-Fi 5 extender, but it’s faster and more stylish than the budget competition. Don’t be put off by its age: it still deserves a place on anyone’s shortlist.

TP-Link’s RE300 is basic, but it’s incredibly easy to set up via the TP-Link Tether app and it comes with a couple of extra modes to help you make the most of your current wireless network. We found it worked best in default mode, where speeds averaged 11.3MB/sec in testing. If you’re a tinkerer, however, you can also set it up so it uses the faster 5GHz band as a dedicated link to your existing network and the 2.4GHz band for your devices. It’s also worth trying out a few different wireless settings, such as switching radio bands, before you splash out on a new bit of kit. You might find that this gets you a better signal from your existing equipment and that there’s no need to buy an extender at all. What speeds can I expect? As a rule, we’re happy with anything over 120Mbits/sec (15MB/sec). To put that into context, Netflix recommends a connection speed of at least 5Mbits/sec for HD streaming and 25Mbits/sec for 4K video. A good, solid Wi-Fi network should easily be fast enough to cope with multiple simultaneous high-resolution video streams. As a bonus, if you have a TP-Link router that supports its OneMesh technology, you get hassle-free, seamless connectivity wherever you are in your home. Needless to say, you need a Wi-Fi 6 router and compatible devices to make the most of it, but this extender gives you the latest wireless tech at a bargain price. To test network performance, we use a laptop equipped with an Intel Wi-Fi 6 network card supporting 2×2 MIMO. We connect this laptop to the extended network, then take it to various areas of the home and copy a standard set of files to and from a NAS appliance, connected by Ethernet to the main router. By measuring the average read and write speeds, and comparing them to those achieved when connecting directly to the router, we can measure how each extender helps Wi-Fi range and performance.It’s very easy to use as well, with setup managed by the superb TP-Link Tether mobile app, which provides access to all the settings you might need.

With the receiving notebook 40 feet from the extender, it fell short of its competitors with only 50.6Mbps of bandwidth available. That’s one-sixth the performance of the Nighthawk EAX80.When the test system was moved upstairs to a bedroom, the throughput was a more reasonable 173.1Mbps, with slightly higher performance than the Linksys RE7310 and half the Nighthawk EAX80’s 358.0Mbps.