Best Wi-Fi Routers for 2026: TP-Link Dominated Our Latest Round of Lab Testing
The Federal Communications Commission has announced a ban on the sale of new foreign-made routers, impacting most Wi-Fi routers available in the US. Currently, only Netgear and Eero have received exemptions from this ban. Despite ongoing investigations into TP-Link routers, they remain recommended due to a lack of documented evidence against them.
- ▪The FCC's ban on foreign-made routers will affect nearly all Wi-Fi routers sold in the US.
- ▪Netgear and Eero are the only consumer routers exempt from the ban as of now.
- ▪TP-Link routers are under investigation for security concerns but are still recommended by CNET.
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| Original publisher | CNET |
| Canonical URL | https://www.cnet.com/home/internet/best-wi-fi-routers/ |
| Publication time | Wed, 27 May 2026 22:02:00 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-27T22:23:05.954Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-27T22:23:05.954Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | SD3OMHI-0JC1 · 2 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Editor’s note, May 13, 2026: On March 25, the Federal Communications Commission issued a notice that the sale of new foreign-made routers will be banned going forward. Virtually every Wi-Fi router available for purchase in the US meets the FCC’s “foreign-made” criteria. As of May 13, Netgear and Eero are the only consumer routers that have received an exemption. All the other routers we recommend on our best list have previously received FCC approval, but there’s a risk that they won’t be able to receive software and firmware updates after Jan. 1, 2029. CNET is reporting on the ongoing router ban news, and, with the exception of Netgear and Eero, we recommend that you hold off on purchasing a router until we learn more about the software extension and which router brands get exemptions.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at CNET.
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