The 2 Best Wi-Fi Extenders for Your Home Network

A Wi-Fi extender can solve a common problem many people face at home: a wireless network that’s slow, inconsistent or straight-up missing when you’re trying to use a device at the fringes of your router’s range. An extender latches on to your wireless signal where it’s good and blasts out a separate Wi-Fi signal of its own, which may be just enough to keep you streaming, browsing and downloading. But a Wi-Fi extender isn’t a panacea. It can’t fix a slow internet connection, nor can it improve a misconfigured or misbehaving router.

To achieve the best results from a Wi-Fi extender takes an involved setup process. “There’s no such thing as plug-and-play in setting up an extender,” says Dong Ngo of Dong Knows Tech, who has reviewed networking devices for decades. “Just plugging in the thing won’t do anything,” he says. “In fact, it only causes interference that adversely affects your existing Wi-Fi network.” He notes that these are products that require reading the instructions.

Our top pick, the TP-Link’s RE605X, is a Wi-Fi 6 device that gives great, consistent performance at long range. Even better, it outperforms competing extenders that, at least on paper, should offer faster speeds. The TP-Link RE715X is another good option that supports even higher speeds, but the results are dependent on your home networking setup. D-Link’s E15 works well enough for most browsing and streaming, at a lower price.

For more information on our top picks, as well as our research and testing process, keep reading below.

• Best overall Wi-Fi extender
• A faster Wi-Fi extender (in certain situations)
• Lower-price Wi-Fi extender
• Others you should know about
• How to set up a Wi-Fi extender
• How we picked

Best overall Wi-Fi extender

Pros

• Fast enough to support the top speeds of most devices you’re likely to connect to it
• Excellent performance at the longest range of any extender we tested
• Gigabit Ethernet port allows you to transform it into a wired access point

Cons

• Very large size
• A higher price that gets close to what you could pay for a decent mesh Wi-Fi upgrade

TP-Link’s RE605X has a lot of power for its (very bulky) size. By itself, it delivered among the fastest average speeds of the seven extenders we tested, and when we later slapped it in a typical home network by connecting it up to a router in different configurations, it gave us the highest average performance at a distance other extenders struggled with.

The RE605X’s speeds were only beaten by TP-Link’s higher-price RE715X AX3000 extender, and just by a little bit, in one specific test of a not-too-common setup. When we tested in a more real-world scenario, the RE605X blew past the average speeds of the RE715X by nearly 30%. The RE605X is plenty fast for the main ways you’ll probably be using it: internet browsing, streaming and gaming at the longest possible range.

While its average speed of 172 megabits per second in our real-world suite of tests should be fine for most people’s internet plans, we acknowledge that’s going to feel subpar if you’re paying for a half-gigabit (500Mbps) of bandwidth or more from your internet service provider. A Wi-Fi extender isn’t meant to be the workhorse of your home network, though, but rather a tool to give you a good-enough Wi-Fi connection at a location that previously had nothing. The RE605X performed great at a distance where other extenders struggled to deliver a signal that we could connect to, and when they were able to, these lesser extenders delivered average speeds anywhere from 25% to 60% worse than the RE605X.

If you have prewired Ethernet connections in your home, or don’t mind installing some (or stringing cable), the TP-Link’s included gigabit port allows you to transform the RE605X into a makeshift access point. This helps to avoid the speed issues that all extenders suffer from when connecting back to your router wirelessly, and the Gigabit Ethernet port ensures your overall performance won’t be hamstrung by the physical connection. Other Wi-Fi extenders can cheap out with a Fast Ethernet port instead—10% the maximum theoretical speed.

According to Ngo, the RE605X’s speed classification of AX1800 is the minimum you should shoot for in a new extender, which helps to ensure that all of your devices will be able to connect, individually, at their maximum possible speeds. (The “AX” means the router supports the Wi-Fi 6 standard, while the “1800” represents the total maximum bandwidth in megabits across every band the router supports.) Most people don’t own enough Wi-Fi 6E (Wi-Fi 6 with an extended spectrum) devices to make the faster standard worth paying extra for right now, which is why we’re sticking with a Wi-Fi 6 extender.

We appreciate that you can adjust the strength of the RE605X’s emitted Wi-Fi network in the extender’s app settings, in case its extra range is causing issues within your home configuration. It also has a built-in “High Speed” mode for automatically selecting which of your router’s bands to connect to if you don’t want to decide yourself. And if you already have a TP-Link router, you can use this extender to create a “OneMesh” network. Both settings will move connected devices to whichever access point provides the best connection as you travel around your home.

The RE605X has the rough dimensions of an iPhone 14 and is around 2 inches thick. Its fully extended antennas add another 3½ inches of height. It’s a large device that plugs directly into the wall and is going to stand out wherever you place it, a small price to pay for the strong performance it delivers. Big as it is, though, it won’t block both slots of a typical electrical outlet as long as you plug it into the top one.

A faster Wi-Fi extender (in certain situations)

Pros

• Faster potential speeds if you’re using a 160-hertz Wi-Fi network and compatible devices and have little radio interference 
• Very strong speeds at long distance compared with other extenders we tested
• Gigabit Ethernet port 

Cons

• About as much as it would cost to upgrade your home to a Wi-Fi 6 mesh network
• Large size
• Most people aren’t likely to benefit from performance improvements

TP-Link’s RE715X looks like a much faster Wi-Fi extender than our primary pick at first glance, although it doesn’t make sense for everyone; it’s a better choice for homes in less densely populated areas. The RE715X and RE605X are virtually identical in their design, save for two key details: The RE715X supports WPA2 and WPA3 encryption if your primary router uses the latter (not that big of a deal), and the extender can output a wireless network using huge 160-megahertz channels on its 5-gigahertz band (a big deal with a big if).

What does this mean? In perfect conditions, your Wi-Fi 6 devices (that support 160MHz connections themselves) could see even higher speeds. But there are so many caveats to using 160MHz channels on 5GHz, we don’t think this is going to be the typical setup for most people that purchase this Wi-Fi extender.

In short, there are only two “chunks” of spectrum that you can use in the 5GHz band for 160MHz, and they’re both overlapping with what’s known as DFS—short for dynamic frequency selection—which means your wireless router won’t even try to use the band if it detects signals from entities like local airports, weather radar, military radar, et cetera. Beyond that, the 160MHz band is prone to interference from neighboring wireless networks. You might experience worse connectivity and speeds, which you’d have to fix by reducing the size of your 5GHz network’s channels. And this brings you right back into the RE605X’s territory.

We don’t want to discount the RE715X’s capabilities. Its speeds easily blew past everything we tested save for our top pick, and it does have the potential for even better performance. It just makes a lot more sense for rural or suburban settings (with lots of space and/or reasonable neighbors). You’re unlikely to be able to take full advantage of the router’s flashier speeds in densely populated areas, which makes the RE605X a better (and slightly discounted) pick for most.

Others you should know about

Pretty much any company that makes a wireless router also has many extenders that you can buy. If you total up the number of Wi-Fi extenders found on the websites of the “Big Four”—TP-Link, Linksys, D-Link and Netgear—there are nearly 70. That’s a lot, which is why it can be so incredibly confusing to find a great extender among the noise.

We generated our list of 13 contender devices for this guide by scouring comparative reviews and testing charts from five different reviewers, supplemented by our years of hands-on experience testing extenders. Of our seven finalists, the three extenders we tested that we haven’t yet mentioned in this guide—TP-Link’s RE500X and RE505X, and D-Link’s DAP-1610—were all mostly able to give us some kind of a working connection on our tests. However, their overall average speeds fell short of those of our primary pick, TP-Link’s RE605X, by anywhere from 40% to 60%.

No extenders from Netgear, Linksys or other companies made our list of finalists, based on both our initial criteria for evaluations and previous experience directly testing some of their best-reviewed extenders against our finalists for this guide.

We don’t recommend spending much more than $100 on a new Wi-Fi extender, for the simple fact that you can start outfitting your home with a quality mesh Wi-Fi kit that replaces your router and extends your network around your home for not much more: Eero’s router and extender combination, for example, or TP-Link’s Deco system. “I can’t recommend range extenders because they add so little value in so few situations as compared with mesh systems that a mesh system is just the much smarter choice,” says Jerry Jongerius, an engineering consultant who writes volumes about wireless networking at Duckware.

We’re not quite as fatalistic as Jongerius about wireless extenders, but we don’t think it makes sense to buy a so-so solution that would cost as much as a stronger, whole-home system. The latter can also manage which devices connect to which access points as you move around your home to ensure you’ll get the best possible connection wherever you are.

How to set up a Wi-Fi extender

Wi-Fi extenders aren’t a simple solution, and setting them up can be complex. They can cause lots of questions, legwork and confusing configuration issues, which you’ll want to fully understand before you pick one up to enhance your existing wireless network. You’re also going to have to deal with a more involved setup process to achieve the best results from a new Wi-Fi extender.

1. First, you’ll need to install your extender at a location that’s around the halfway point of your router’s range before firing up the extender’s associated app or web-based graphical user interface to connect it to your existing network. You can use a Wi-Fi scanning app such as WiFi Analyzer for Windows or WiFi Explorer for macOS. Assuming that goes well—and it might not, if your existing router is fussy—you’ll have a good idea of where that halfway point is. 
2. Next, you’ll need to name the Wi-Fi network the extender creates. If you use the same name as your original wireless network, you’ll need to trust that your devices are smart enough to know when to drop your router’s poorer signal for your extender’s stronger one. If you give it a different name, you’ll have to manage this yourself by switching your devices between your two different Wi-Fi networks whenever your speeds start to suffer.
3. Finally, decide whether your new Wi-Fi network should live on the same wireless band as the original Wi-Fi network your extender is connected to (2.4GHz or 5GHz). Some extenders can manage this for you; if not, or if yours doesn’t, you could be hamstringing your speeds unknowingly. Use the same band for both, and your extender will have to do double duty when receiving and transmitting signals between your router and a connected device. Your maximum potential speeds will get halved right out of the gate—noticeable on a slower connection, less so on a faster one.

How we picked

Trust us

I’ve interviewed experts, built testing procedures and run benchmarks for many routers, extenders and mesh systems over my two-decade career as a technology journalist. I get a kick out of wireless networking—so much so, I frequently make a three-ish-hour commute to a remote house in California to test new gear, which lets me control for many of the wireless variables and neighborly interference I otherwise experience at my apartment home in Silicon Valley. For this article, I also interviewed two of the Wi-Fi experts whose work I regularly consult to make sure I’m not missing a beat with my own testing: Dong Ngo, a multidecade reviewer of networking equipment and primary author at Dong Knows Tech, and Jerry Jongerius, engineering consultant and prolific author of wireless networking explainers at his blog, Duckware.

We tested

Understanding the quirks and limitations Wi-Fi extenders offer, here’s what we were looking for from the best of them:

• Speed: A minimum of AX1500 (Wi-Fi 6 support with a total combined bandwidth of 1500Mbps)
• Price: Under $100 or less than the cost of a mesh network setup
• Ethernet: A Gigabit Ethernet port for turning the extender into a wired access point 
• Set up/app experience: An easy-to-understand web-based user interface, at minimum
• Size: A wall-attached extender versus a boxier modem- or router-sized device 

We set up our testing by connecting an iPhone 12 Pro to an extender from a handful of feet away, within the same room, and an iPhone 14 Pro Max approximately 45 feet and multiple rooms away from the extender. We then used the WiFiman app to test transfer speeds between the two devices when connected to each extender’s 2.4GHz and 5GHz networks, exclusively. This helped us narrow down to the finalists. From there, we connected the extender to an AC3000 router (set up in a room halfway between the test iPhones) on either its 2.4GHz or 5GHz band, connected the iPhone 14 Pro Max to one of the router’s Wi-Fi networks on the 2.4GHz or 5GHz bands, and connected the iPhone 12 Pro to one of the extender’s Wi-Fi networks on the 2.4GHz or 5GHz bands. Finally we reran the WiFiman transfer tests for many different combinations of these connections.

The purpose of our testing was to get a sense of how each extender performed in its most basic state at a very long range, as well as how it might perform in a real-world environment across the many different ways a person might think to connect it to their home network. We considered each extender’s speeds across these different scenarios for our final evaluation.

Our testing focused on long-range speeds, as we’ve found that you’re most likely to notice a missing or bad connection at a distance. If you’re just browsing the web or watching Netflix, a very fast extender isn’t going to feel any different than a faster extender.

Our experts

• Dong Ngo, a multidecade reviewer of networking equipment in Oakland, Calif., primary author at Dong Knows Tech and former labs manager at CNET (disclosure: Buy Side from WSJ has a business relationship with Red Ventures, the company that owns CNET)
• Jerry Jongerius, engineering consultant in Kissimmee, Fla., and prolific author of wireless networking explainers at his blog, Duckware