Your internet is slow and the fix is not a new router: the bottleneck triage

The router counter will happily sell you the box that cannot fix this, because "internet slow" and "router weak" feel like the same sentence - and they are two different faults with two different shops. Run the triage first: it is free, it takes ten minutes, and it changes the purchase from a gamble to a receipt.

The ten-minute triage

• Test A - wire past the router: one ethernet cable from the ISP's box (the ONT, the 4G router itself) to a laptop. Speeds jump to what you pay for? The problem was your Wi-Fi distribution - the router section below is about you. Speeds are still slow at the same number as on Wi-Fi? The router is innocent; stop shopping for one.
• Test B - one device, one time: all speed tests on a single device while the rest of the household is off the network. A family of five streaming is a bandwidth problem with no product answer; the desk's advice there is a conversation, not a box.
• Test C - the evening curve: fast at 6am, crawling at 9pm is cell congestion (if on 4G/5G) or shared-line congestion - the mast and the ISP's plan are the suspects, not your antenna.

What "Wi-Fi 6 for a slow line" actually does

Nothing to the pipe; possibly something to the house. A newer router buys you: capacity under many devices, better battery behaviour for phones, and range from the newer antenna designs. It does not buy a single kilobyte if the ceiling is above your incoming line - a router cannot deliver what the ISP never sent. The real reasons a decent modern router is still the right purchase: a five-year-old box with an overheating power supply, a family where forty devices now share what twelve used to, or the same-dumb-ISP-line with a house whose layout defeated the old radio. Each of those is a distribution problem, and the fix must match it: placement before hardware (the centre-high spot, away from the metal shelf and the TV), channel work (the free scan from any phone), and a second access point over a long cable when one radio is asked to cross a concrete slab - the desk's extender-vs-router article covers that decision at length.

The buy list, if you still buy

Gigabit ports (not "100M" on the spec page - the silent limiter that makes a new router useless to a fibre day), a real QoS or device-priority feature if the household argues about the evening, and support for the security updates that keep it honest for five years - the last one means a brand with a reputation, which is also where the manual and the firmware archive live. And the desk's non-negotiable: change the admin password on day one. The router nobody secured is the reason a street of them goes slow at 2am.