Whether you work from home occasionally for your standard full-time salaried job or work from home exclusively as a member of the growing gig economy, establishing a reliable, fast and secure connection to the wider universe of interconnected networks is vital to your success. For home offices, the basic network router is the primary hardware component providing this gateway to the internet, and all that lies beyond it.

These guidelines and the accompanying comparison tool, created by Mark W. Kaelin for TechRepublic Premium, will help you through the process, so you can find an effective piece of networking hardware.

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MULTIPLE BANDS

Beyond mere coverage, you may want to ensure that your wireless connections are faster and more reliable and have enough capacity to handle your workload. Purchasing a network router with multiple-band wireless communication protocols will help make that possible. Single-band, dual-band and tri-band network routers add capacity and speed to the network using proprietary protocols and multiple receiving and transmitting antennas. More bands mean more capacity for more devices, which means greater overall speed.

SPEED FALLACY

When it comes to measuring the overall speed of your home office network, you should temper your enthusiasm. Network router manufacturers often promise throughput speeds like 600Mbs or 10Gbs per second, but those are ‘theoretical’ speeds. The practical speed of any network router is going to be limited by the transmission speed provided by your ISP and by the devices connected to your network. Those advertised speeds are a good gauge for router potential, but you should not expect to achieve them under real-world conditions.

Enhance your selection process with our eight-page PDF and spreadsheet. Previously priced at $19, this is now available for download at just $9. Alternatively, enjoy complimentary access with a Premium annual subscription. Click here to find out more.

TIME SAVED: Crafting this content required 20 hours of dedicated writing, editing, research and design.