108 PCWorld OCTOBER 2020HERE’S HOW SPEED UP YOUR HOME INTERNET ON THE CHEAP
The total cost for our pandemic routers
has been about $162. That’s still a fair cost,
especially since a decent mesh tri-band
Wi-Fi 6 system would cost more—and
probably wouldn’t make a difference with
our current ISP.
If I could do it over again, I would have
skipped the original RT-1900P completely.
Instead, it’ll be handed down so someone
else will benefit from it.To squeeze more performance out of my AiMesh
network, I replaced my ancient RT-1900P with an
Asus Blue Cave router.the hardwired
backhaul.
Clearly, the $70
investment in the
RT-1900P was a
mistake, as a more
modern router
would give me
better
performance. So
back to Amazon I
went to look for a
newer router with
better performance
and a reasonable
cost. Asus had
recommended its
Blue Cave router.
which is a dual-
band, 802.11ac,
MU-MIMO router with a 4x4 antenna
configuration. Beyond the alphabet soup of
network specs, it features an Intel Lantiq
dual-core processor and 512MB of RAM,
which most network nerds say will help in
packed households.
It also generally gets high marks from
reviewers (go.pcworld.com/himk). To stick
with my cheapskate ways, I picked up a
refurbished Blue Cave for $75. This replaced
the $70 RT-1900P as the wired node, and it
indeed increased performance greatly: PCs in
the bedroom and garage hit the limit of our
Internet at 100Mbps.