A router is the heart of a local network. Each network needs one router, and preferably no more than one.
At a minimum, a router includes a WAN port to connect to an Internet source and a few LAN ports for connecting local wired devices. Technically, a router is a layer 3 network switch.
Nowadays, the term “router” is often used to refer to a “Wi-Fi router” — one that has a built-in Wi-Fi access point. Consequently, we use “non-Wi-Fi” to refer to a standard router that lacks built-in Wi-Fi capability.
The UniFi Dream Router 7 (UDR7), one of three Ubiquiti’s 2025 compact UniFi cloud gateways, is a significant upgrade to the previous version, the UDR. It’s somewhat a combination of the non-Wi-Fi UniFi Cloud Gateway Max (UCG-Max) and a UniFi Wi-Fi 7 access point, such as the U7 Pro Max, into a …
Ubiquiti has some exciting news for home and SMB users looking for top-notch modern networking solutions—think multi-Gigabit and Wi-Fi 7. Today, the networking company announced not one, not two, but three new compact UniFi Cloud Gateways to expand its UniFi family, including the Dream Router 7 (UDR7), UniFi Express 7 …
Amazon today announced the eero 7 and eero Pro 7, adding them to the eero Wi-Fi 7 family, which already includes the eero Max 7 mesh router and eero 7 Outdoor access point. These new products are both mesh routers—they each can work as a standalone router, or you can …
Judging from the model names, you might think the ASUS RT-BE92U BE9700 tri-band router is simply the Wi-Fi 7 version of the previous Wi-Fi 6 RT-AX92U. That’d be reasonable. After all, the RT-BE86U is the latest variant of the RT-AX86U, and the RT-BE88U is the latest in the RT-XX88U lineage. …
If you have been following my router reviews, you’ll note that I have increasingly mentioned the “online privacy risks” notion. An example is Amazon’s popular eero hardware. As I mentioned in some of those posts, I was so concerned about the privacy risks that I often felt hesitant to plug …
So far, TP-Link has been one of the biggest, if not the biggest, adopters of Wi-Fi 7, with more hardware options than any other networking vendor. Judging from what’s coming from TP-Link at CES 2025, that’s likely to continue to be a fact. It’s worth noting, though, that TP-Link has …
The reasons on the surface behind why the US government consider banning TP-Link routers.
