One unexpected goodie included with the router is a 6-month subscription to Amazon Cloud Drive (double check which one, though, as Amazon killed the ‘unlimited’ tier mentioned in the marketing literature) and that’s a great bonus for backup purposes. Also known as WiGig, it operates in the 60GHz spectrum and aims to replace wires altogether. Its most intriguing feature, though, has to be support for 802.11ad which is a short range, high-speed connectivity that requires line of sight to work properly. You can aggregate a pair of them to reach 2Gbps and there’s even a 10G LAN SPF+ connector for NAS access (assuming you’ve got a device that supports this technology).Īdd in a pair of USB 3.0 ports and some powerful hardware (quad-core ARM processor clocked at 1.7GHz, 1GB RAM and 512MB storage) and you can see why this Netgear router will appeal to businesses as well as enthusiast-level consumers. As technically advanced as most routers on this list, it is rated at 2600Mbps using 4x4 MU-MIMO and has plenty of LAN ports – seven Gigabit ones, in fact. Technically speaking, the Nighthawk X10 is a consumer router but like the Asus model above, it offers features that you will usually find on business routers. Asus has also partnered with Trend Micro to offer a built-in security package called AIProtection. There’s a lot more here including support for RADIUS, the ability to aggregate four 1Gb Ethernet ports into a virtual 4Gb one (it has a mighty eight Gigabit Ethernet ports in all) and even support for LTE as a backup connection to improve resilience – the router already has two 1Gbps WAN ports that can be aggregated or used independently.Īs you’d expect from a top of the range router, it offers 4x4 MU-MIMO and theoretical speeds of up to 2.6Gbps with open plan coverage up to 100m (albeit on the 2.4GHz band).

Granted, it is excruciatingly expensive but packs the sort of features you’d never expect from a router like an M.2 slot to plug in an SSD to convert it into a mini-NAS. The BRT-AC828 (opens in new tab) is its only business router and the device ticks a lot of boxes, even for small businesses looking for more than 10 simultaneous connections. Asus has a reputation for manufacturing great consumer products and the Taiwanese firm – known for its laptops and motherboards – has been trying its hand at wireless products.

Small business routers 2016