In our tests, network speed, or throughput, varies from “this YouTube video will never finish loading” to “you can download a video game in an instant.” Generally, we looked for the routers that performed above average, and we dismissed the slower routers.
Any phone or laptop you buy today or may have bought in the past few years uses the new standards, and having more than one band makes it easier for your router to manage traffic around any slower, Wi-Fi 4 devices on your network. The cheapest routers-which cost as little as $20 or $30-use a single band, or frequency, of the Wi-Fi standard that came out in 2009 (802.11n, rarely referred to as Wi-Fi 4).
