In June 2025, we wrote an article on gaming routers where we showed that paying a premium for the "gaming" model won't meaningfully impact your gaming experience. We're doubling down on that, but now with more data. For a good gaming experience, having a connection with low latency (ping) and low jitter (constant ping without lag spikes) is important, and your router has an impact on it.
With our newest test bench update for Wi-Fi routers, we've added a Gaming Usage as well as wireless latency measurements for all routers. The gaming usage has three components: latency to reduce your ping, speed to ensure your game traffic can come and go, as well as downloading game updates, and range to ensure you can reach your gaming station if it's far from your router.
While we concluded in the original article that there was no meaningful difference between gaming and non-gaming routers in terms of latency, with the amount of data we've now accumulated, we can now be more nuanced.
A Note on Methodology
In order to reduce variables, we isolated routers from external sources of latency as much as we could, while still approximating a home setup. To do this, we used a non-Internet-connected server as our ping target. This server was connected to a switch, which was also connected to the WAN port of the router, making the server appear to be online from the router's perspective. This ensured the router performed all the actions needed to get the packet ready for the internet and protect the network by properly inspecting incoming packets. A client device was connected to the Wi-Fi router and pinged the server, while a second device was creating 200Mbps of traffic on the Wi-Fi network. This left us with a measurement primarily attributable to the router's management of wireless communication, isolated from other variables.
When gaming online, your connection needs to go through a lot more obstacles to reach the game server than just the router. In that chain, there isn't much you can control, unfortunately. While your router impacts your network connection, our test only captured the additional latency it introduces, which is just one component of your game's overall ping.
Our first tested batch of 22 routers showed that wireless median latency could be anywhere between 6 ms and 13 ms, with median jitter values ranging from 1 ms to 10.4 ms. There was one exception to these results with the Linksys E5400. This router had a median latency of 82 ms. These results were mainly due to the 200Mbps traffic being higher than its 100Mbps bandwidth limit. To give this router a chance, we lowered the traffic to 80Mbps and still measured a median latency of 32.5 ms. So, while most routers will provide adequate wireless latency, there are poor routers as well.
It's Hard to Predict a Router's Latency Just with Its Specifications
Gaming routers are notorious for their higher price point. These prices are normally justified by gaming-centric features and better hardware, which are advertised to reduce in-game latency and improve connection reliability. And while it's true that the most expensive routers, whether they're marketed for gaming or not, tend to score higher, it doesn't mean that a budget router can't have the low latency numbers of its higher-end counterparts. There are some great budget options that can still deliver low latency, making for a satisfactory gaming experience, like the TP-Link Archer BE9500 or the GL.iNet Flint 2 (GL-MT6000). The following graph shows that there is no clear correlation between price and the gaming score.
Gaming Features Give an Edge, but Aren't the End-Game for Low Latency
A lot of marketing advertises gaming features for routers, promising reduced latency and lower jitter. We've tested the impact of features we could toggle on and off. While we can confirm that some of those features have a positive impact, like the Netduma R3's "Ping Optimizer," which reduced jitter at the cost of slightly increasing latency, it's still a better choice to grab the TP-Link Archer BE9500 for the same price, which doesn't need special features and achieves better performance. Still, any features that can help with router latency were enabled during our testing.
However, it's important to note that most features aimed at improving the connections to game servers are, in most cases, Quality of Service (QoS), Smart Queue Management (SQM), Port Forwarding, or troubleshooting features, which can still be achieved without paying the gaming tag premium. Also, these features only have an impact when connecting to a specific game server or using a specific application, which we aren't covering in this test bench. We already talked about how QoS/SQM can impact your network connections in specific cases in our initial gaming router article. Port Forwarding falls into that same category, where it can be beneficial in certain cases but won't always net you benefits. Let us know if you would like us to tackle this subject more deeply! You can leave a comment below or email us at feedback@rtings.com.
Wi-Fi 7 Improves Latency
Remember that article where we called out companies misleading consumers about the current implementation of Multi-Link Operation in Wi-Fi 7? Well, Wi-Fi 7 isn't just about MLO. It also expanded on OFDMA and MU-MIMO. Both features get quite complicated in how they work and how they manage to improve latency. Without going into too much detail, both features improve how devices share airtime between themselves, letting more devices transmit in a short period of time more reliably. This improves how airtime is shared, allowing more efficient parallel transmissions through OFDMA and MU-MIMO. The gap between Wi-Fi 6 and Wi-Fi 7 shows clearly in our rankings.
From our initial testing batch, the Wi-Fi 7 routers are the ones punching the highest in the latency score. That said, Wi-Fi 7 isn't a guarantee. Some Wi-Fi 7 routers still performed on par with Wi-Fi 6 or 6E routers like the eero 7 or the UniFi Express 7. The GL.iNet Flint 2, a Wi-Fi 6 router, is also among the top performers with a 6.9 latency score, and it's not a high-end product either.
Distance Has Little Impact on Latency
When we first set out to test latency, we planned on measuring latency at the same 10 spots we used to measure speed over distance. However, the distance between the client device and the router has little impact on overall latency if you have a clear signal. While throughput is affected by the signal strength and noise sources, which vary over distance, wireless transmissions travel at a constant speed. This means you won't notice the difference in travel time whether you are 10 or 100 feet away from your router. However, if you don't have a clear signal or there is a lot of surrounding noise, this could lead to packet collision or transmission loss, which will impact latency due to retried transmission.
We've tested three different routers at our 10 measuring spots, just like we do for speed and range tests, but noticed no notable difference in latency. In the end, we chose to measure and show latency at only one spot, close to the router.
The Mesh System Latency Tax
Even though distance doesn't affect latency results, connecting to a mesh system will have a big impact on latency numbers. In a mesh system, one unit will be connected to your modem, the gateway to the internet. Let's define this as the main node. Any other units are satellite nodes. When a client device connects to a satellite node, there's a latency penalty caused by the Wi-Fi overhead between the two nodes. We already mentioned the speed tax of wireless backhaul for mesh systems in our article the High Tax of Wireless Backhaul, so we can now talk about the latency tax.
Each "hop" needed between each mesh unit to reach your modem will add latency to your connection. When compared to a single router (or a single mesh unit), it's shocking how many lag spikes mesh systems add to the network connection. If you want to get rid of this added latency, using a wired backhaul is the best way to go if that can be an option.
When wired backhaul isn't an option, connecting to the main unit instead of the satellite will remove the ~10 ms of added latency to your connection. If you really want to optimize your setup, since we just talked about how range doesn't affect latency, but download speed does, download your game update on your mesh satellite. When your game is all downloaded and ready to go, unplug your satellite node so your device connects to the main mesh unit (if the signal can reach it). Is it overkill? Most likely. But it might be less of a hassle than getting a wired backhaul!
Understanding the Inherent Limits of Wi-Fi: Background Scanning
Even with all the improvements Wi-Fi 7 brought to latency, wireless gaming is still pretty far from the gold standard of connecting your gaming device with an Ethernet cable. Multiple factors add latency to the connection, but the main culprit is background scanning. Any client devices with Wi-Fi enabled will periodically scan the area for Wi-Fi networks. This can be beneficial to find better Wi-Fi networks or find a better mesh unit to connect to. While doing so, the device needs to tune to other Wi-Fi channels to scan them. During that time, the device is temporarily unable to communicate with its router, thus halting any communications and creating a latency spike. And the worst part: this is completely driven by client devices. The router has very little power over client behavior.
In our testing, this background scanning is clearly seen when looking at the time series of latency, as shown in the previous graphs. Our client device does one background scan every three minutes. These latency spikes are also why we use the median instead of the average when presenting our latency results. Averages are heavily impacted by big outliers, namely these lag spikes. And since these lag spikes can vary between two scans, and the router has very little control over them, we didn't want these scans to affect our results too much, which is why we use the median latency and not the averages. We also didn't want to completely disable them, or try to test in between them, since these scans are part of the normal experience of using Wi-Fi, and we consider them to be part of the test.
When Latency Is Also Impactful: Live Calls and Web Browsing
With pretty much all routers in our current line-up, they will all be adequate at worst for video/audio calls or web browsing; hence, why we lean into gaming usage when we talk about latency. Latency can be felt during live calls or web browsing, but the amount most routers add to your overall network connection is negligible for these usages. A good example of this is when live reporters are halfway around the world, and the host asks a question. There is always a delay for the reporter to get the question, which is a good show of how latency impacts live communication. A 15 ms delay won't be felt. A few hundred milliseconds of delay is where it will be noticeable, and maybe even disruptive. There is little chance your router is creating that sort of latency (unless you have a completely bloated network, as we showed in our article about gaming routers.
5GHz vs. 6GHz
While the difference between 2.4GHz and 5GHz is night and day, as shown in the initial router's gaming article, there doesn't seem to be any meaningful differences between 5GHz and 6GHz. Both 5GHz and 6GHz have wide, independent channels that let access points spread across multiple frequencies and not interfere with one another. In theory, we should expect slightly better performance from 6GHz since frequencies are higher, but there doesn't seem to be any practical impact on latency. We're working with a fairly limited dataset, since we have tested latency on both 5GHz and 6GHz on only 10 routers so far. We will be revisiting this topic after we have gathered data on all the routers we have, which will increase our statistical power.
Conclusion
Wi-Fi latency hasn't been solved yet, but improvements are being made as technologies advance. We hope Wi-Fi 8 will bring even more improvements to wireless latency and reliability. Until then, our new test bench update will let you choose a router with low latency and low jitter if these aspects are important to you. The single best recommendation is still to always use an Ethernet cable when possible, to really solve any latency issue between your device and your router. If that isn't possible, you're now armed with a new tool to help you find the best router for your latency needs!