I've always been an advocate of keeping your personal data as private as you can to stave off the creeping hand of digital tyranny, but for gaming? Nah, no chance. I'm a (wannabe) competitive gamer and I need my latency as low as possible, and VPNs are a no-go. At least, that's what I thought until I actually tried a bunch of them out for an extended period.

During my testing of the best VPNs for gaming, I was surprised to find that—at least with some of them, in my location—it wasn't a case of making the best of a bad situation. In fact, in some cases my ping actually dropped lower than without a VPN on.

This is good news not just because it means you don't have to keep toggling your VPN off and on, or keep adding an app to your 'split tunnel' in the VPN software each time you install a new game, but also because you get to keep all the benefits of a VPN while playing your games.

If you're cautious about sketchy enemies or teammates potentially trying to don their 1337 hacker gloves and doxx you, for instance, keeping your VPN on can give you some more peace of mind. And if your ISP throttles gaming speeds, as some are known to do, a VPN should be able to hide what you're doing so speeds are kept high.

It might be counterintuitive at first, but the fact that a VPN might not actually cause much of a problem for your ping and even improve it, in some cases, makes sense when you consider that really all that's going on is your data is still just travelling to and from a given destination.

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VPN performance comparison

Local ping (Counter-Strike 2)

No VPN

12.58

NordVPN

12.73

Windscribe

12.34

Surfshark

13.54

Mullvad

12.55

Proton

13.8

ExpressVPN

12.22

03.757.511.2515

Ping (ms)

Local ping (Counter-Strike 2) Data

Product	Value
No VPN	12.58
NordVPN	12.73
Windscribe	12.34
Surfshark	13.54
Mullvad	12.55
Proton	13.8
ExpressVPN	12.22

Average ping in CS2 Deathmatch games in the same country (UK) and connected to the same game server, with data collected over multiple runs.

VPN performance comparison

Jitter (Cloudflare speed test)

No VPN

10.66

NordVPN

14.06

Windscribe

12.9

Surfshark

12.37

Mullvad

12.4

Proton

20.7

ExpressVPN

12.07

07.51522.530

Jitter (ms)

Jitter (Cloudflare speed test) Data

Product	Value
No VPN	10.66
NordVPN	14.06
Windscribe	12.9
Surfshark	12.37
Mullvad	12.4
Proton	20.7
ExpressVPN	12.07

Average jitter as measured over multiple runs on speed.cloudflare.com

VPN performance comparison

Download time (15.3 GB, Team Fortress 2 on Steam)

No VPN

271

NordVPN

275

Windscribe

276

Surfshark

276

Mullvad

276

Proton

275

ExpressVPN

287

075150225300

Time (seconds)

Download time (15.3 GB, Team Fortress 2 on Steam) Data

Product	Value
No VPN	271
NordVPN	275
Windscribe	276
Surfshark	276
Mullvad	276
Proton	275
ExpressVPN	287

Time taken (in seconds) to download the same 15.3 GB on Steam, connected to the same Steam download server.

VPN performance comparison

Distance ping (Counter-Strike 2)

NordVPN

85.13

Windscribe

86.19

Surfshark

86.58

Mullvad

87.69

Proton

86.93

ExpressVPN

85.79

0255075100

Ping (ms)

Distance ping (Counter-Strike 2) Data

Product	Value
NordVPN	85.13
Windscribe	86.19
Surfshark	86.58
Mullvad	87.69
Proton	86.93
ExpressVPN	85.79

Ping in CS2 Deathmatch games in a different country (USA) and connected to the same game server.

It can either travel along a route and to a server that your internet service provider (ISP) dictates, or that the VPN dictates (or, as actually happens, a mix of the two). If a VPN server you're connecting to is closer to a game server than your ISP's server, or if the VPN route gets you there more directly, you might end up with better ping and lower latency.

For instance, as you can see in my benchmark results above, my ping actually dropped to 12.34 ms connected to Windscribe, my pick as the best VPN for low ping. Sure, the difference isn't massive given my ping was already a relatively low 12.58 ms, but the fact it dropped at all over multiple benchmarks is impressive. I will say that ExpressVPN was even lower, but all things considered I'm picking Windscribe over that one, personally, based on the companies and how much I'd trust my data in their hands.

Those results are averages across multiple runs in-game, and actually if I look at the raw data, one run for Windscribe gave me an average ping of 12.27 ms, and one with ExpressVPN gave 12.16 ms. And even when pings were higher, they were usually only ever more slightly so. NordVPN, for instance, would be my own personal VPN of choice because, while it might give me a slightly higher ping than my native connection, the difference really is very slight and there are other benefits to the VPN (overall compatibility, number of servers, other features like adblocks, etc.).

If you want your VPN to work across the board, compatibility will be an important factor. With Windscribe and Surfshark, for instance, I couldn't get Valorant up and running at all. I was either blocked from logging into the Riot app or from booting up the game, and I struggled to load Riot's website, too.

That being said, if you have a problem using a VPN with a particular app or website, you can permit the latter to not go through your VPN without disconnecting everything else from it. This is called 'split tunnelling'. In Windscribe, for instance, I can turn split tunnelling on and set it to 'exclusive', meaning everything goes through the VPN excluding the apps and sites I choose. After doing this, I added the Riot app and the Valorant executable(s) to the list—including 'Valorant-Win64-Shipping' which I had to find by inspecting the process in Task Manager.

That's more of a workaround than actually getting an app or website working with the VPN, but it's an option. Every VPN I tested allowed for split tunnelling, so if you don't mind having some things route outside your VPN then any should be fine. But if you want everything on the VPN, that will eliminate some options which leaves NordVPN as the best overall.

The long and short of it, though, is that if you can manage to get everything on the VPN, it doesn't have to be as much of a death sentence for your online gaming connection as I thought—far from it. If your ISP throttles gaming speeds, as some have been known to do, then it can help with that, but even if you have a pretty great connection for online gaming to begin with, I've found it can still help or at the very least not hinder anything.

Doom runs on just about everything. From 100 pounds of mouldy potatoes to a pregnancy test, creators have endeavoured to run everyone's favourite demon-blasting fest on all sorts of hardware—but cramming its code inside DNS text records is a new one on me.

That's what Doom Over DNS does, and it's a remarkable bit of lateral thinking from the mind of Adam Rice. Essentially, the entirety of shareware Doom has been split into 1,964 DNS text records that can be stored across a single Cloudflare zone, which in turn is reassembled by a PowerShell script making public DNS queries. Resulting in... well, Doom, as we've come to know and love it.

As this breakdown explains, the Domain Name System (DNS) turns domain names into IP addresses, acting a bit like a phonebook for the internet.

However, it also supports text records, with fields that are usually used for mundane entries like email authentication data. Each record can hold around 2,000 characters, and they're not validated, which means you can put anything you like inside them.

Apparently. This is all news to me, as I understand the internet as a series of tubes. Props if you got the reference without clicking the link.

With an initial goal of storing an encoded movie collection within that text data (I wonder how many records that would take?) the project was pivoted to first Base64-encode a picture of a duck (why not), with a metadata record that would allow a reassembly script to piece it back together.

Duck test successful, the scope of the project was adjusted. Sure, a small .jpg of a duck is easy enough, but a 1 GB .mp4 file? That'd take roughly 670,000 text records. What's needed is something smaller, something easily compressed... something like Doom.

After using Claude to re-write some of the game code to run from a memory stream rather than on-disk system files (and cutting the audio to keep the file size down) Doom was then compressed into code chunks that would fit inside multiple text records, which were then contained within a single CloudFlare Pro DNS zone.

The script that runs Doom is a neat little 250 lines of standalone PowerShell code, which is capable of resolving all the DNS queries needed to grab Doom's data in 10-20 seconds. It then reassembles everything in memory, loads the assemblies, and launches the game with nothing written to disk.

"DNS is almost 45 years old and it was designed to map hostnames to IP addresses. It is not a file storage system. It was not designed to be a file storage system", says Rice.

"Nobody at the IETF was thinking about it being used as a file storage system when they wrote RFC 1035. Yet here we are. The most boring protocol on the internet is also, quietly, one of the most abusable."

Well, congratulations. Doom has once again been forced to run on something it should not be run on, and we've all learned something about how the internet works. Or how Doom works. Whatever. It ain't half cool though, ey?

After the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) put consumer-grade routers produced in foreign countries on its Covered List earlier this week, effectively banning the sale of new models in the country without special permission, Taiwanese manufacturer Asus has been quick to respond.

An official statement released by the company yesterday says the following: "Asus has proudly served US customers since 1991, with a long-standing commitment to trusted innovation and strong product security.

"We are confident in the integrity of our supply chain and the security of our networking products. This FCC action has no impact on existing ASUS router users, software updates, and customer support."

With unfortunate timing, Asus also published a major security update for its routers on the very same day. The patch aims to mitigate against CVE-2025-15101, a particularly nasty-sounding vulnerability that scores an 8.5 out of 10 (or High severity) on the official record.

According to its listing, CVE-2025-15101 "potentially allows actions to be performed with the existing privileges of an authenticated user on the affected device, including the ability to execute system commands through unintended mechanisms".

On the one hand, you could argue that the continual discovery and patching of these flaws speaks to Asus' commitment to ongoing security. On the other, the fact that such major vulnerabilities are still cropping up on Asus routers is perhaps a little defeating of the point.

Of course, all router manufacturers experience security issues from time to time, and Asus is far from unique in this regard. Hackers managed to hijack over 16,000 TP-Link routers (and other networking devices) in 2024, creating an Azure-slamming botnet of massive proportions.

Not to mention older Cisco Linksys routers being called out by the FBI for their vulnerabilities, no less. However, Asus does seem to patch its routers more often than most, which again, could be looked at in two different ways.

Certainly, the timing of this particular fix is less than ideal. But hey, it's a good chance for me to remind you once again: Update your networking hardware, folks. It simply ain't worth the risk to ignore.

As part of the country's defense-shoring strategy, the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has put "all consumer-grade routers produced in foreign countries" on the Covered List. This means foreign routers are now "deemed to pose an unacceptable risk to the national security of the US or the safety and security of US persons" and will require special permission to be sold in the US.

The FCC notes that "the restrictions imposed today apply to new device models", not ones consumers already own, or ones being sold and marketed that have been previously approved by the FCC.

This is considered an application of President Trump's strategy [PDF] to "re-secure our own independent and reliable access to the goods we need to defend ourselves and preserve our way of life." Ie, isolationist economics, ostensibly for national security.

It makes sense for routers, specifically, to be on this list, given the potential vectors for attack they open up. And if those routers are foreign-made, it makes sense that a state might be cautious. We've already seen, for instance, TP-Link routers being hijacked by hackers working on behalf of the Chinese government. And there have been calls to ban these routers for some time.

The FCC's decision is informed by an inter-agency expert determination [PDF] that explains the risk: "Given the criticality of routers to the successful functioning of our nation’s economy and defense, the United States can no longer depend on foreign nations for router manufacturing ... Compromised routers can enable in-depth network surveillance, data exfiltration, botnet attacks, and unauthorized access to US government or American businesses’ networks ... foreign-produced routers present additional and unacceptable risks to Americans."

This statement cites a report from CISA, the NSA, and the FBI that says these bodies "assess that People’s Republic of China (PRC) state-sponsored cyber actors are seeking to pre-position themselves on IT networks for disruptive or destructive cyberattacks against US critical infrastructure in the event of a major crisis or conflict with the United States."

These concerns aren't anything new, as anyone who's got an eye on cybersecurity will likely have seen increasing focus on 'supply chain' attacks over the last year or two. The Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP), for instance, recently said "software supply chain failures" are one of the top web app security risks. In other words, vulnerabilities at source (or some other point in the supply chain) are becoming a real issue. Throw in some increased risk of interference from the manufacturer's state agencies, and you can see why precautions might be prudent.

Thus the ban on new foreign routers. However, it's not an unbreakable blanket ban, as the determination states—and the FCC agrees—that there should be a way for routers to become approved:

"To facilitate this transition period, entities that produce routers in a foreign country are encouraged to apply for Conditional Approvals (Annex A) which, if approved, will allow such producers to continue to receive FCC authorization for their products while they work to address the US government’s national security concerns described above."

So, it's not as if all TP-Link routers are going to disappear in a cloud of smoke and you'll have the state knocking at your door to collect contraband. Instead, it just looks like the US government is getting a little more serious about ensuring the networking devices it lets in are secure and don't pose a national security threat.

Cloudflare has sent us a copy of its quarterly DDoS threat report, and it makes for hair-raising reading. The gigantic CDN provider claims that it recorded "an unprecedented bombardment" from a botnet in the fourth quarter of 2025, resulting in a DDoS attack that peaked at 31.4 Terabits a second.

Cloudflare claims that this is "the largest attack ever disclosed publicly", and "a new world record". The attack is said to have been launched by the Aisuru/Kimwolf botnet against Cloudflare customers and its infrastructure, with the campaign itself dubbed "The Night Before Christmas".

The campaign is believed to have begun on December 19, 2025, and it's said that over 94% of the attacks delivered between one and five billion packets of unwanted traffic per second, with 58% of those lasting between one and two minutes.

It appears that similar attacks are on the rise, with Cloudflare claiming that in the final quarter of 2025, the amount of DDoS attacks overall grew by 31% quarter-over-quarter and 58% year-over-year.

Telecommunications providers are believed to have borne the brunt of so-called "hyper-volumetric" attacks, with 42% pointing their way. 15% are said to have targeted information technology and services providers, while a mere 2% affected gaming. Small mercies, I guess, although Arc Raiders developer Embark has recently complained of an "extensive" coordinated DDoS attack this week, which suggests that modern gaming providers are far from immune.

In terms of the most attacked locations for DDoS attacks in Q4 of 2025, China, Hong Kong, Germany, and Brazil make up the top four, with the US coming in fifth, just ahead of the UK. In terms of the geographical sources of the attacks, the report claims that Bangladesh tops the list, with Ecuador, Indonesia, Argentina and Hong Kong making up the rest of the top five.

The report highlights that the top 10 list of attack source networks "reads like a list of internet giants", stating that:

"The common thread is clear: threat actors are leveraging the world's most accessible and powerful network infrastructure, primarily large, public-facing services."

Cloud computing providers like DigitalOcean, Microsoft, Tencent, Oracle and Hetzner are claimed to be the largest sources of DDoS attacks, "demonstrating the strong link between easily-provisioned virtual machines and high-volume attacks".

Ah, it's a scary digital world out there. By the looks of this data, it seems it might not be long before this new record is broken, although Cloudflare says that over 50% of HTTP DDoS attacks were detected and mitigated by its new real-time botnet detection system. So, it's the same old game of cat and mouse—but this particular squeaker seems to be getting larger every year.

For someone whose daily job is to write about, test, and review PCs, components, and peripherals, you'd think I'd know instantly what my top pick for the best hardware of 2025 is. The problem is, I've been utterly spoilt for choice this year.

As well as officially reviewing numerous mice, ergonomic keyboards, motherboards, RAM kits, processors, and all kinds of other hardware, I've also used a range of PC products for testing game performance and just as part of my collection of test rigs in the office. Some of them I've bought myself, others have been kindly provided by hardware companies (and let me take this opportunity to directly thank MSI, Asus, and Corsair on that note).

Absolutely none of it has been rubbish. Even the products that didn't get a high review score still had some feature to make them stand out a bit from the crowd, or offered something special for the right user. I absolutely adore Thermal Grizzly's Der8enchtable, for example, but it's near-useless for most PC gamers.

Likewise, I was left really disappointed by the Naya Create, but I bet that with all its 'early access' niggles fixed, it could be the ultimate ergo keyboard for some folk. And I can say pretty much the same about anything I've reviewed or used this year.

But there's been one piece of kit that's graced my office in 2025 that, and I say this without a hint of hyperbole, has utterly changed my daily PC life, both for work and gaming. Believe it or not, it's a mere router. Yes, I know that the technically correct phrase is 'a router, switch, and wireless access point all-in-one device', but you know what I mean.

Specifically, it's the TP-Link Deco BE68 (or BE67, if you buy it at Amazon) and continuing with the theme of specificity, it's a mesh router. Basically, you get two or three nodes/hubs/routers in the box, and you can either link them together via LAN cables or let them automatically create a seamless network via Wi-Fi.

The secret sauce behind the Deco's brilliance is Wi-Fi 7, and I can tell now, with all honesty, switching from a Wi-Fi 6 network to a home full of Deco wireless connectivity has been the best upgrade I've done... well, not just this year, but probably the past five years.

I have a 1.1 Gbps fibre connection to my house, but with my previous Wi-Fi network, I could only ever get a download speed of 450 Mbps, maybe 500 at best. Given the location of my office and the nature of the house, trailing LAN cables everywhere isn't an option, nor is using powerline adapters to route the network through the electrical mains rings.

That's all a thing of the past. Using just two out of three hubs in the Deco BE68's box, I now have a wireless network that I have absolutely no problem hitting my Internet connection speed limit with. Of course, I only get that on my PCs that have Wi-Fi 7 motherboards, but thanks to the Deco's triple bands and the multi-link operation (MLO) feature of Wi-Fi 7, older hardware still enjoys great networking speeds, too.

While the Kinesis Gaming Freestyle Edge RGB Plus and Razer Pro Click V2 Vertical mean I have a stress-free body during work, they only benefit me. The TP-Link router has improved everyone's digital life at home, though for the most part, they're completely oblivious to it.

I'm not, though. No longer do I have to explain 'Why is the Internet slow?' or magically make someone's movie stop buffering while I download a 100 GB game for testing. Since switching to the Deco BE68, nobody has complained once about our net connection. I can download Baldur's Gate 3 for testing a CPU in less than 20 minutes. I have multiple networks for heavy users, guests, and IoT devices—none of which were difficult to set up.

Sure, I wish I still had the Ryzen 9 9950X3D or Alienware 18 Area-51 I reviewed, but even if I did, they certainly wouldn't have made as big an impact on me, my home, and everyone in it as the TP-Link Deco BE 68 has.

Oh dear Lord, I'm gushing over a bloody router. Quick, somebody send me a new CPU or graphics card to review that triples my frame rates. I mean, that's the sort of thing PC gamers want to read about, yes? Not 'Nick's family haven't noticed how great the Wi-Fi is now'.

If you want to find out who wins in the PC Gamer Hardware Awards, we'll be publishing all the winners on New Year's Eve.

The vast majority of new games released for the humble PC are published with a list of what hardware is required to run it and another list of 'recommended' specs. However, the breadth and depth of this information vary enormously, but not so in the case of the forthcoming voxel-based sandbox Hytale. Its system requirements are so detailed that you'll probably be able to figure out the exact setting you'll be using the game, long before you get a chance to install it.

You can check them out for yourself via Hypixel Studio's news post on the matter. Let's start with the good stuff to begin with, just as Hypixel does: listing the expected performance, graphics preset, and screen resolution for the minimum, recommended, and 'streamer' requirements.

Specifically, it's 30 fps at 1080p Low for minimum, 60 fps at 1080p High for recommended, and "stable framerate with high-quality video capture and streaming at 1440p". Okay, so two out of three isn't bad, at least.

Moving on to the actual hardware requirements, you'll immediately notice that none of this is especially demanding. Even for the recommended specs, you're looking at a six-core CPU from 2019, a decade-old GPU, 16 GB of RAM, and just 20 GB of storage, albeit on an NVMe SSD. Heck, the minimum CPU is a four-core, four-thread Ryzen from 2017!

Truth be told, this is no different from Minecraft, where both Bedrock and Java versions sport system requirements so old that a degree in archaeology might be more useful for translating them than having some PC knowledge. However, as any keen Minecrafter will tell you, if you want to enjoy the game properly, your rig needs quite a bit more poke behind it.

It's the same with Hytale, but where Mojang just leaves you to figure it all out yourself, Hypixel Studios has gone into a lot of detail about client and server performance, network requirements, and how the game's visual settings will interact with your hardware.

For example, it writes that "[an] Intel HD Graphics 630 achieved ~30–34 FPS at 1080p [Low]" and that for streaming, "One internal benchmark (AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D, NVIDIA RTX 5080, 2x32 GB DDR5-6000) sustained around 400 FPS at 3840×1440 resolution with view distance set to 768 blocks in singleplayer while recording the game in AV1."

I wish more studios would take the time to put this much effort into detailing their game's system requirements. Just stating that it needs a certain CPU and GPU doesn't tell me anything, to be honest: we need to know how well the game will run on that hardware and with what settings.

But even that's only half the story. What about multiplayer or streaming? What's really more important to the game's performance, CPU or GPU? Do I really need 100 GB of storage space, or can I get away with less?

None of this will make the game better, of course, but if a developer is willing to carefully explain the relationship between the game, its performance, and your hardware, it suggests to me that it's doing more than the bare minimum of just getting it run.

Hytale is expected to have an early access launch in January 2026, so it's not long to wait to see just how well Hypixel Studios understands its game and PCs in general.

If there's one thing sure to ruin your day at work, it's receiving an unrealistic target from your higher-ups. Pour one out, then, for the Google employees who attended an all-hands meeting earlier this month, only to be told that they need to double its serving capacity every six months to meet AI compute demand.

That's according to CNBC, as the news outlet got a look at a presentation reportedly given to employees by Google AI infrastructure chief Amin Vahdat earlier this month. A slide entitled "AI compute demand" informed the team that "Now we must double every six months... the next 1000x in 4-5 years."

CNBC also reports some direct quotes from the meeting, which was also said to be attended by Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai. While Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta have been pouring huge sums of money into data center expansion in recent months to boost their own AI serving capabilities, it appears that Google's lofty expansion goals might not be receiving the same budget.

Vahdat reportedly told employees that "[Google's] job is of course to build this infrastructure, but it's not going to outspend the competition, necessarily" and that the real goal will be providing infrastructure that is "more reliable, more performant, and more scalable than what's available anywhere else."

That's not all. Vahdat is also claimed to have said Google needs to "be able to deliver 1,000 times more capability, compute, storage networking, for essentially the same cost and increasingly, the same power, the same energy level."

"It won't be easy," the Google AI chief said. "But through collaboration and co-design, we're going to get there."

That sounds like quite the task, doesn't it? I can only imagine the blank faces in the room as the Google engineers wrapped their heads around the idea of expanding their infrastructure on a truly gigantic scale, in record timeframes, without substantially increasing the budget—both literally and figuratively.

Management consultancy firm McKinsey & Company estimates that AI data centers are expected to require $5.3 trillion in capital expenditures by 2030, or roughly $1 trillion over Nvidia's current market cap, if you prefer to think of it that way. Certainly, if efficiencies could be made to enable unbelievably rapid AI compute expansion without pushing data center power requirements and budgets further into the stratosphere, the company to do so would be in a prime position to make the most of the AI boom.

If, indeed, it lasts that long to begin with, given mounting concerns over a massive, potentially economy-wrecking AI bubble. Still, they don't call it a moon shot for nothing. Get to work, Google AI infrastructure engineers. It sounds like an impossible task, but Vahdat seems to believe in your work ethic. You didn't need a lunch break anyway, did you?

I often take the internet for granted. Over the years it's taken many forms but the underlying technology has mostly remained the same. However, even the very foundation of the internet as we know it was not always a given. To that end, I was recently told about the Protocol Wars of the 1970s, 80s, and 90s.

The Protocol Wars is mentioned in passing in Sir Tim Berners-Lee's new book This is for Everyone, and Sir Berners-Lee is often called the inventor of the World Wide Web, so I should probably take what he says seriously. Berners-Lee essentially married HTML (the visual webpage code we see every day) to the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and Domain Name System (DNS), which were already in operation.

The former of these two already-operative systems and protocols, TCP, is what was up for question prior to the late-80s/early-90s creation of the World Wide Web.

I knew TCP as a protocol existing alongside IP (Internet Protocol)—TCP/IP—with them together forming the group of protocols that underlie our internet today. These protocols are essentially sets of rules governing how systems communicate over networks and the internet, ie, explaining how data should be organised and transmitted. TCP deals with the virtual handshake between systems and data formatting (the host-to-host communications) and IP deals with delivering the packets of data (the inter-networking).

In networking, TCP/IP is often taught alongside the somewhat equivalent OSI model. Both can be conceptualised as different layers in a stack, with each layer performing a different function. The layers in each of the two stacks—one stack for TCP/IP, one for OSI—correspond to layers in the other, and while TCP/IP is what's used in practice, the OSI model is often used to help understand what's going on in network and internet transfers.

That's how it's usually taught in networking today: The OSI model is taught as another way of conceptualising what's going on in TCP/IP transfers.

So I was a little surprised to find that, actually, TCP/IP and OSI battled it out in the 70s and 80s, each vying to be the standard of choice for the internet. At least, that's the way my retrospective glasses gleam it, because no doubt at the time it wasn't seen as a march towards the internet as we know it today. That's hindsight.

Before TCP/IP and OSI battled it out, though, TCP/IP was battling other protocols. The Robert Kahn- and Vint Cerf-created protocol had its merits pitted against the protocol underlying the French Cyclades network in the 70s, for instance. This network helped pioneer packet switching (transferring data in packets) but didn't build reliability checking such as error handling into the network—TCP did. TCP/IP also fended off other protocols such as IBM's Systems Network Architecture and DEC's DECnet. Everyone had their different ways of doing things in the early days of the technology—pockets of the internet had emerged via local networks—and few wanted to lose sovereignty in the developing protocol war to connect everything together.

TCP had a lot going for it in such fights. Its biggest assets, as far as I can gather, were twofold: first, that it had a kind of try-first, fix-later approach that had it being used right away, and second, that it was formed by the (then) US Department of Defense (DoD), because of course it was. I suppose this is in part what people mean when they say the internet developed out of military application.

The DoD's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) at the time was sans a 'defense' and was just called ARPA. ARPA worked on ARPANET, which became one of the first packet switched networks. A bunch of ARPANET project-connected bigwigs formed the International Network Working Group (INWG), which came up with TCP, and through learning from other protocols such as the one underlying Cyclades, over the course of the 70s this turned into the fully fledged TCP/IP protocol stack.

These protocols were, of course, used throughout the entire period, and many of the people working on it headed different institutions such as universities. Vint Cerf, for instance, was Chair of the INWG, and he was faculty at Stanford University. Stanford, in fact, helped test inter-network communications with ARPANET. Tim Berners-Lee notes in his book that he would've quite liked to have gone to Stanford in his early days, however, ceded that he didn't even realise it was an option in those early days, and admits he doesn't recall if he even had much of a concept of Silicon Valley at the time.

During the same rough period of time, the European International Organization for Standardization (ISO)—you might know it as the organisation that makes European keyboard layout standards—was developing the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) model. This attempted to do similar to TCP/IP, and was backed by some telephone companies like the International Telegraph and Telephone Consultative Committee (CCITT).

Telephone company involvement couldn't quite match the benefits of DoD and academic involvement in the development of TCP/IP, though. TCP/IP was being implemented and tested as it was being developed, whereas OSI was being developed thoroughly and methodically before being implemented.

Ben Segal, one of the people that introduced TCP/IP at CERN, also where Tim Berners-Lee was working, says of OSI: "ISO's style of standards development was top-down, driven by the committees of experts meeting physically from time to time. ISO standards were printed - for sale - and were expensive. Internet standards were developed bottom-up and free on-line."

"TCP/IP was cheap and simple, but in fact disruptive."

TCP/IP became an open standard, and by the time its first fully fledged and usable standard came out in the form of IPv4 in 1981, to be properly adopted in 1983, OSI didn't have anywhere near the ubiquity of TCP/IP. The latter had been used out in the wild by various institutions around the world (institutions in Britain and other European countries had connected to ARPANET by then). CERN accepted ISO/OSI was out by 1988.

And so, the war was won, and TCP/IP became the standard underlying the internet communications we use today. All that was left was for it to get hooked up to HTTP for all our flashy visual webpages. Berners-Lee went on to create the first website while at CERN in 1990. The website told readers how to use the World Wide Web and set-up their own websites.

Oh, and then TCP/IP decided to yoink a layer from OSI and mix-mash it into its own stack. That's why the fifth layer in TCP/IP is often called layer seven: because it is the seventh layer in the OSI model, the latter of which is still used to help theoretically understand TCP/IP.

Best gaming PC 2025

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Choose a list Best gaming laptop 2025Best gaming PC 2025Best gaming rigs 2025Best handheld PC 2025Best mini PC 2025

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BEST OVERALL

1. HP Omen 35L

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BEST BUDGET

2. Lenovo Legion Tower 5i (Gen 8)

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BEST COMPACT

3. Velocity Micro Raptor ES40

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ALIENWARE

4. Alienware Area-51 Gaming Desktop

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BEST MINI PC

5. Minisforum AtomMan G7 PT

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If you've got an old Asus router, you might want to check whether it's needing a firmware update. Asus has just reported that three of its older DSL modem routers have a critical vulnerability, an "authentication bypass vulnerability" that "may allow remote attackers to gain unauthorized access into the affected system."

Asus hasn't just dropped that bombshell and left the room, though; there's a firmware update you can install to patch the vulnerability. The affected models are the DSL-AC51, DSL-N16, and DSL-AC750, and here are links to the firmware you should install for each of these:

• DSL-AC51: firmware
• DSL-N16: firmware
• DSL-AC750: firmware

The firmware you want is the latest one, version 1.1.2.3_1010. You download this firmware, and then upload it to your router's firmware upgrade page.

For instance, for the AC51, after downloading and unzipping the file on a PC connected to the router, you go to your router's administration page and navigate to Advanced Settings > Administration > Firmware Upgrade, then select Browse in the New Firmware File field, and click Upload. It will reboot when it's done.

These three affected routers are all getting on a bit now— each is listed as an EOL product on Asus' site. Older devices tend to be more at risk of becoming vulnerable to security issues, so it's not a massive surprise that old routers like these can be discovered vulnerable to such critical security flaws.

Even if you don't have one of these routers, critical security vulnerabilities can act as a good reminder to keep our routers updated. I don't know about you, but router updates aren't something I tend to keep on top of. Many will update automatically, but it can't hurt to check every now and then—I'm saying this to hammer it into my own head, more than anything.

In fact, it's probably a good idea to do the rounds on updates every now and then: Windows updates, graphics drivers, router, and software. You never know when it might catch something critical.

The best PC gaming gear 2025

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BEST GAMING CHAIR

1. Secretlab Titan Evo

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BEST GAMING DESK

2. Secretlab Magnus Pro XL

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BEST GAMING HEADSET

3. HyperX Cloud Alpha

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BEST GAMING KEYBOARD

4. Asus ROG Strix Scope II 96 Wireless

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BEST GAMING MOUSE

5. Razer DeathAdder V3 HyperSpeed

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BEST PC CONTROLLER

6. Xbox Wireless Controller

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BEST STEERING WHEEL

7. Logitech G Pro Racing Wheel

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BEST MICROPHONE

8. Shure MV6

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BEST WEBCAM

9. Elgato Facecam MK.2

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Sometimes, it's hard to get overly excited about a new bit of PC gaming kit. Take the gaming routers, for example. We all use them (and yes, I know it's technically more than just a router—there's a switch and a wireless access point in the box, too), but they just sit on a shelf somewhere or on the floor, getting poked by bored cats. They just do their thing and we rarely give them a moment's thought, until they ruin a Steam download, of course.

I felt very much the same way until I recently reviewed three new devices from TP-Link: two mesh systems, the Deco BE68 and Deco BE25 BE5000, and the Archer BE9700. Using two Intel Core Ultra 200S gaming PCs to test the wireless performance of them, I came away seriously impressed by just how easy they were to set up, how ridiculously quick they were, and perhaps most importantly, how affordable they were compared to the first generation of Wi-Fi 7 gaming routers.

Take the Archer BE9700. You can buy one of those for $200 at Best Buy. That's genuinely very little money for such a capable Wi-Fi 7 router. Heck, you can't even buy a brand-new, semi-decent graphics card for that amount of money.

As someone who's only ever used the router supplied by an ISP over the past decade, I had quite the shock at how much better the BE9700 was than my stock unit. I'm not talking just about raw speed (seeing a 1.1 Gbps Steam download over Wi-Fi in my office was a real eye-opener), but how much better every wireless in my home worked on that router.

No stutters, no hiccups, just peerless connectivity, anywhere in the house. Even the non-Wi-Fi 7 devices were a lot happier with all of the new routers I tested.

So maybe it's time we actually made more of a fuss about routers than we do. Sure, they won't turn your budget gaming PC into an RTX 5090 hot-snottin' monster, but it'll make your digital life just that bit smoother and more enjoyable. That's hardly headline-busting news, but it's a message well worth hearing, nevertheless.

The best gaming routers

Here's a conundrum to start this review: When is a Wi-Fi 7 networking device not really a Wi-Fi 7 networking device? The answer is when it's the TP-Link Deco BE25. It might seem very harsh to start things so negatively, but it's best to get the most important point about this home mesh system out of the way first.

Basically, unlike most Wi-Fi 7 routers and mesh networks, the Deco BE25 doesn't support the 6 GHz band or the 320 MHz channel. You just get 2.4 and 5 GHz, plus a maximum 240 MHz channel, making it not better than an average Wi-Fi 6 system. On paper, at least, because the little wireless hubs have a trick or two to make up for it all.

If you're unfamiliar with the term 'home mesh system', it's basically a group of synchronised Wi-Fi routers that work together to create a broader and seamless wireless network. Have poor Wi-Fi in your basement or attic bedroom? Then a mesh setup is ideal for you. However, most systems seem to be extremely expensive, and that's certainly true for the high-end models.

TP-Link's Deco BE25 is at the other end of the spectrum, with an MSRP of $300, but it typically sells for $209 to $230. That's for a three-node pack, making each unit as little as $70. This is a great price for any Wi-Fi 6/7 router, packed with modern features, and a lot cheaper than most gaming routers, so if you've been putting off making the jump to mesh, then the BE25 might just change your mind.

Of course, you need to be certain that it's going to be right for your needs, so let's consider coverage to begin with. This is a rough estimate of the floor area that the mesh system can ideally cover, and TP-Link suggests that a three-pack of BE25s is good for 6,600 square feet (613 square metres). That's more than enough for most homes, though if you have a large property with distant buildings, you'll be better off with something with more reach, like the Deco BE68.

Each BE25 router (well, router, switch, and wireless access point) in the mesh network communicates with the routers via backhauling, and the Deco can do this wirelessly, wired via its 2.5 Gbps LAN ports, or both. Unfortunately, each unit only has two LAN ports, and one will be used as a WAN port to connect you to the Internet. If you plan to embed the mesh within a pre-existed and complex wired network, you may have to rethink those plans.

While outright performance isn't going to be important for the average digitally-connected home, it is when you've got a lot of gamers in the mix. The Deco BE25 is a four-stream, dual-band transmitter, achieving a theoretical maximum of 688 Mbps on the 2.4 GHz band and 4,324 Mbps via 5 GHz. However, it also supports Wi-Fi 7 multi-link operation (MLO), whereby the unit streams data across both bands, for a peak throughput of 5,000 Mbps (hence the BE5000 name).

That might sound really good and way better than what a lot of Internet connections can handle, but the reality of Wi-Fi is far from its peak numbers. Interference from other devices, building materials and structure shapes, and distance between transmitters and receivers all affect the data transfer speed.

The above performance charts show the maximum data throughputs between two Intel Core Ultra 200S gaming PCs, using Killer Wi-Fi 7 BE1750x adapters. The 'near' results are for when the PCs are directly in line with a Deco BE25 unit, at a distance of 1.8 metres (6 feet); the 'far' results are for when the computers are a little over 6 metres (20 feet) away, with several walls and other devices in the way.

As you can see, compared to the considerably more expensive Deco BE68 mesh device, the BE25 is slower in both of its bands, despite having the same theoretical throughputs. Why this is so almost certainly lies in the fact that the BE68 has twice as many antennae as the BE25 (8 vs 4), as well as double the number of streams.

But while the numbers look disappointing, if you only have a 1 Gbps Internet connection or slower, the Deco BE25 will be more than fast enough. And don't worry about the far results, as that's the whole point of a mesh network—just add a node where your Wi-Fi is the slowest and you'll get a handy boost. Not to the maximum, though, because even wired-plus-wireless backhauling, you're going to be limited by the performance of the 5 GHz band.

It's worth noting that MLO is an exclusive feature of Wi-Fi 7, so if you don't have any wireless devices that support the standard, you won't be able to use it.

With the best performance being found using the BE25's MLO mode, one nice feature about TP-Link's mesh devices is that you can set up separate networks to have relevant devices kept away from each other. For example, you can have a 2.4 GHz network just for IoT/smart devices, alongside a dedicated MLO network, as well as a 5 GHz guest network. They're all sharing the same bandwidth, of course, but they'll never see each other as the networks are isolated.

All of this is done via a simple setup process, but if you're used to handling router configurations via a browser on your PC, then you might be disappointed to learn that TP-Link requires you to use its phone app to do all of this. It's a very nice bit of software—clean and simple to use—but poking settings with your finger does feel somewhat kiddified compared to how one normally does it.

Certain aspects of the software package are hidden behind a paywall, such as advanced parental controls, customisable VPNs, and other security features. While I found this to be rather unacceptable on the $700 Deco BE68, I can excuse it for the much cheaper BE25. I dare say that a good number of potential buyers for the little mesh system won't really care about the extras and will just be happy with the controls that you do get.

However, they might care about the total absence of USB ports, for adding external storage to the network, or the fact that the BE25 looks remarkably like a smoke detector, or that adding additional nodes to an existing network can sometimes fail or run into glitches. But when the whole caboodle is this cheap, you can't complain too much.

Admittedly, the relatively small price tag is the main reason why you'd consider the TP-Link Deco BE25 over anything else, because why else would you choose a Wi-Fi 7 mesh system that isn't giving you Wi-Fi 7's best features? If you just think of it as an affordable Wi-Fi 6 home mesh system, albeit with a slightly misleading specification, then you'll be fine.

If you've just bought a new gaming PC or upgraded your current one to an AMD Ryzen 9000-series or Intel Core Ultra 200S setup, there's a good chance you'll be considering an upgrade to your Internet router, too. That's all because such rigs sport ultra-fast Wi-Fi 7 adapters, and if you've got a web connection that's 1 Gbps or faster, you'll surely be wanting to enjoy some mighty quick Steam downloads, if your home is wirelessly networked.

What's probably stopping you is the price of a typical Wi-Fi 7 router: Netgear's Nighthawk RS600 is $400, and even its slower RS300 model is $329, while Asus is asking $350 for its RT-BE88U, and that doesn't support the full Wi-Fi 7 feature list. So if I tell you that the TP-Link Archer BE9700 has every Wi-Fi 7 trick in the book, five fast LAN ports, an easy-to-use interface, and costs just $200, does that make you change your mind?

It certainly made me pause for thought and wonder if we have a new contender for the best gaming router you can buy right now. Jumping the gun somewhat, I have to say now that the Archer BE9700 isn't the outright best one around, as it's nowhere near as fast as most of the top-end routers on the market, and it's not quite cheap enough to be considered a 'budget' offering either. But it's still a very good Wi-Fi 7 router and well worth considering.

But let's go back and start with what you're getting for the money. The Archer BE9700 is a router (technically, a router, switch, and wireless access point in the same box) that supports the full spectrum of Wi-Fi 7 features: 6 GHz band, 320 MHz channel, multi-link operation (MLO), 4K-QAM, and more. Along with seven streams and six external antennae with beamforming, it's got everything you need for a modern home packed full of wireless devices and gaming enthusiasts.

What it doesn't have are theoretical peak data speeds to drop your jaw. Don't get me wrong: for most users, the Archer BE9700 will be more than fast enough, but if you have a really speedy Internet connection, then TP-Link's router isn't going to keep up with it.

To test the wireless performance of each band, plus its MLO capabilities, I used two Core Ultra 200S gaming PCs, both with the same Killer Wi-Fi 7 BE1750x adapter, and tracked the rate at which data passed between them, via the router, using iPerf3. Two situations were examined: one with the two PCs and router all on the same plane, and separated by a distance of 1.8 metres (6 feet), and the other with everything on different floors in my house, with the distance between them being a little over 6 metres (20 feet).

As you can see, the Archer BE9700 does well against TP-Link's Deco BE68, but then again, it should do, as it has higher theoretical throughputs. However, the 'far' results suggest that despite all the external antennae and relatively high power consumption of 40 W, the router isn't the best at coping with distance.

It should be noted that everyone's home environment is different, and you could find that the Archer BE9700 performs much better in your house. Equally, it could be worse; it depends on so many factors that it's almost impossible to tell how well a router is going to work in your home without testing it directly.

The MLO result was a bit of a surprise, in both a good and bad way. Multi-link operation works by having the router selectively transfer data across all three bands, dynamically switching between them to maximise throughput and minimise latencies. If you add up all the speeds for each band, you get a value of 9679, hence the Archer's BE9700 name.

With a rating of BE14000, the Deco BE68 should be up to 44% faster than the Archer BE9700, and yet the near results in the MLO are a mere 5% higher. However, that speed difference opens right out with the far results, and that's possibly because the BE68 has more antennae than the Archer, even though they're internal.

I spent quite a bit of time tweaking the position of the external antennae, but saw little difference in the data transfer speeds, both near and far. I can only assume that my home, especially my office, possesses some kind of anti-Wi-Fi gremlin that has a particular grievance with TP-Link's Archer routers.

That all said, the 5 GHz and MLO far speeds would be good enough to allow you to max out a 1 Gbps Internet connection, which isn't bad at all. And if it's faster than that, then you can always use the Archer BE9700's LAN ports. You get one rated to 10 Gbps and four at 2.5 Gbps, which is a decent amount, both in count and performance. The fastest port and one of the 2.5 ones can automatically switch to WAN mode, which is great for giving you options as to whether you want a fast net connection or a really fast Ethernet network.

Configuring all of this is a piece of cake, thanks to the browser-based settings interface. Unlike the two Deco mesh models in the results comparison, which use a phone app for setup and config options, the Archer is blessedly more traditional. Want a separate 2.4 GHz network, just for IoT/smart devices? Need a discrete MLO network just for your gaming PC? Not a problem: just log in, click a few options, and away you go.

It's all very lovely, and while I'm not a fan of the Archer BE9700's staid looks (it's better than the 'alien mothership' vibe that some gaming routers have, though), I don't really have anything of note to complain about. If I had a much bigger house, I probably would, given how quickly its performance drops off with distance, but then I'd be looking at a mesh system instead.

Should your home environment suit the TP-Link router, and you don't need outrageous amounts of wireless performance, then the Archer BE9700 is worth a spot on anyone's Wi-Fi 7 router shopping list.

Home mesh systems might sound like a whole new world of wireless technology, but they're really just two or more 'routers' that can transfer data between themselves, allowing for a greater wireless coverage in your house. I say 'routers' because that's just one part of what's inside: you've also got a WAP (wireless access point) and a network switch.

But regardless of what you call the TP-Link Deco BE68 BE14000, you're getting a very capable device for providing super-fast Wi-Fi 7 in every nook and cranny of your home. You can buy the system as a two or three-pack, and even just use a single unit (or node, to use the correct term), but we're reviewing the $700 triple node offering here.

TP-Link claims up to 8,100 square feet (753 square metres) of coverage with three nodes (6,000 for two and 3,100 for one), which far exceeds the dimensions of a typical home, be it in the UK or the USA. However, if you have a large property with buildings widely separated, that 8,100 square feet of coverage might come in very handy.

The Deco BE68 sits roughly in the middle of TP-Link's Wi-Fi 7 home mesh range due to its maximum speed rating of BE14000. That number refers to the peak data transfer speed in Mbps of the combined three bands that the mesh operates over (2.4, 5.0, and 6.0 GHz). Faster systems sport more bands (e.g. the BE95 has two 6 GHz bands) to improve transfer rates, but naturally they're also a lot more expensive.

The Deco BE68 is expensive too, but given that you get three nodes for $700 (which equates to a single unit coming in at $233), it's actually relatively cheap for a high-end Wi-Fi 7 router. Still pricey, of course, but Netgear's Nighthawk RS600 is $400 for just one unit, though that's not unusual for the best gaming routers.

Fortunately, what you're getting for that steep outlay is very good. As I've already mentioned, it's not the fastest you can buy, but unless you have an Internet connection that's well over 1 Gbps and you need that enormous speed wirelessly, then it will surely be quick enough for you. To test just how quick it is, I used two Intel Core Ultra 200S desktop PCs, both with Killer Wi-Fi 7 BE1750x adapters, and iPerf3 to examine data transfer rates across each band.

It's worth noting that my results are not comparable with those in our other networking hardware reviews, because the test environment and devices used are entirely different. The 'near' results are with both PCs directly in line with a Deco BE68 unit, at a distance of 1.8 metres (6 feet), whereas the 'far' results have both PCs a little over 6 metres (20 feet) away, with several walls and other devices in the way.

TP-Link sent us another mesh system, a Deco BE25, and its Archer BE9700, to compare and review, so at least you're not looking at the BE68's results in isolation. The 2.4 GHz band transfer speeds might seem to be well short of the 688 Mbps theoretical maximum for the unit, but it's actually pretty quick. Better still, the far distance results hold up very well, considering the range and band involved.

Naturally, the speeds on the 5 GHz band are even better, though the drop-off with far testing is more notable. That's to be expected, and this is especially true for the 6 GHz band, which offers blistering transfer rates when you're close, but once you move away or put a wall or two between the device and the mesh node, the speed falls away rapidly.

But that's the whole point of a mesh system, and I hasten to note that only a single node was used in these tests. Adding a second node approximately 4 metres from the test PCs improved the 5 and 6 GHz far results by 60% and 120%, respectively.

Oddly, though, the Deco BE68's 6 GHz results are slower than those for the Archer BE9700, despite having a much higher theoretical maximum (8647 vs 5765 Mbps). I suspect the latter's external and highly directional antennae are helping matters considerably, as while the Deco BE68 has the same number of antennas (eight in total), they're all internal and fixed in position.

Where things become more interesting is when you enable the MLO (Multi-Link Operation) network. This lets the Deco BE68 use all the bands together to transfer data, though it does this somewhat intelligently, switching packets from band to band, depending on what's going on. In this mode, the BE68 outpaces the Archer BE9700, especially in the 'far' results.

Not all wireless devices support MLO, but if your gaming PC or laptop does, I strongly recommend enabling this network on the Deco BE68 and using it exclusively for your rig. And speaking of setting things up, TP-Link has given up support for the use of a web browser to access everything in the nodes. Instead, you have to use a phone app.

It's very good, with clear instructions and everything laid out well, but I dare say there will be many a networking enthusiast who will be instantly put off by not being able to access a node's settings via a PC. The app also contains a number of subscription services, such as HomeShield, but at least you're not bombarded with adverts for it.

Having the ability to quickly and easily fire up additional networks, including ones dedicated to IoT or home smart devices, is nice to see. However, having to pay extra for advanced parental controls or a VPN isn't quite so nice, especially when you've already forked out $700 for the whole system.

And while I'm in complaints mode, I'm a little disappointed with the LAN ports. There are only three per node, and while they're all WAN auto-sensing (i.e. you can use any of them as a WAN port), only one of them is rated at 10 Gbps. If you're using that one for your Internet connection, then any wired backhaul to that node is going to be limited to 2.5 or 1 Gbps, because those are the only other LAN ports available.

I also experienced quite a few niggles when trying to add a second node to the network. In theory, it's a case of clicking a single button in the app to meld additional Deco units to any given network, but the first time I tried it, the extra node refused to play ball. Rebooting the whole setup solved the problem, but it's not an ideal solution.

Lastly, there's the matter of market availability. As things currently stand, the Deco BE68 only seems to be sold in the US. If you live in the UK, then your closest options are the slower BE65 (£550 at Amazon) or the faster BE95 (£935 at Amazon), and it's a similar story for other countries. This might be because Internet speeds higher than 1 Gbps in the UK are quite rare, but it would be nice to have the option to buy a more futureproof mesh system.

Compared to the Deco BE68's wealth of positives, though, these are minor complaints. I should imagine that the majority of users will just want something that you can plug in, spend a minute or two setting up, and then enjoy peerless Wi-Fi speeds anywhere at home, across dozens of devices…and then never have to touch it again.

That's precisely what the TP-Link Deco BE68 offers, and if you're not keen on the alien mothership vibe that most high-end Wi-Fi routers have, the BE68's sleek looks will be very much appreciated, too.

If you know your noise rock from your industrial, your ambient noise from harsh noise wall, there's a good chance you'll enjoy the chaotic screeches of an ethernet cable plugged into a Eurorack module. If not, you might find it a little cool anyway, like I do.

As spotted by Hackaday, creator Wenzellabs recently showed off their NSA Selector, a Eurorack module with two Ethernet ports and an audio output. Effectively, any bits on the detected network will be sent to the output.

Wenzellabs makes it very clear that this is not an audio interface. It doesn't format that sound into an MP3 or WAV file, which can be easily digitally converted into something else. They said, "All traffic is forwarded from one network jack to the other unmodified. It's just tapped, intercepted to convert it to audio."

A Eurorack module is a physical format used in modular synthesisers. With the modern resurgence of modular synthesisers, even the likes of Roland have reinvested in the format.

Though the NSA Selector doesn't make the most pleasing of sounds, there is some room here for creativity, and the chances are that if you care about modular synth, you already have some of that drive already.

Notably, Wenzellabs tests the synth out in a few key areas. At 28 minutes, they scroll around in Google Maps, with the port making a sharp noise every time they move around. Given that the audio matches the bits, the higher the workload, the more aggressive the sound. In the browser and mobile game 2048, at the 25-minute mark, they manage to get a full-on drone as the page is loading ad elements. This is arguably the most 'usable' sound in a more traditional musical sense.

Wenzellabs loads bitmaps at one point, which means you can create images that use resources in a specific way to project certain types of sounds from the Eurorack. They edit the images to make them larger and differently shaped, and open them from a remote machine, which gets different results from the synth. None of it sounds particularly appealing, but they do sound unique. Making weird sounds is one of the biggest reasons people like modular synth.

After approximately 4 seconds of what I can only describe as 'the drill at a dentist's office', Wenzellabs says, "Isn't it great?" Yes, Wenzellabs, it is.

If you want to give it a go yourself, you can buy the NSA Selector (kit for $97 or fully assembled for $110) via their shop, Lectronz, and they've posted a tutorial on how to assemble it yourself.

If anything, it will make you more aware of the hours you spend doomscrolling if every time a video pops up on your feed, you get a small screech from your ethernet port. If my internet habits are anything to go by, maybe that's not such a bad idea.

Anyone who knows the frustration of having their internet drop out when they walk to that one room in the house has likely heard of a mesh network system. It's fairly new at a consumer level, but essentially it's a wireless network that uses a node infrastructure to cover your area in wireless connection. If you've ever tried a wireless booster back in the day, it's kinda like that, but these actually work.

The downside to mesh networks is they're still relatively new and thus can be quite pricy. So when Netgear launched its new Wi-Fi 7 mesh system and it came in at less than half price of its previous offerings, it grabbed the attention of The Verge, and also myself. Netgear's new Orbi 370 comes in a two pack consisting of a router and two satellites and it only costs $250 USD. You can also get it in a three pack for $350.

Being by far the cheapest of NetGear's offerings also means the Orbi 370 is a little underpowered compared to its older siblings. It covers less space, clocks a lower speed, only supports dual band, and caps out at 70 devices. For most people this is likely far more than enough, and having to pay extra for the higher end devices simply would be overkill. It's nice to see this friendlier price point, and generally speaking the cuts are pretty smart to get it there.

The Orbi 370 series is enough to cover up to 6,000 sq ft/ 550 sq metres or about half the size of an Olympic swimming pool. Assuming you live in a home rather than a pool, the idea would be to place the satellites in different rooms but within reach of your router, and hopefully each other to get the best connection. This way if any pesky walls or other interference is causing your issues you should have plenty of connections to get around these hurdles.

Hopefully once set up, you'd be enjoying up to 5 Gbps Wi-Fi speeds, which is honestly more than anyone really needs. High-quality streaming of both videos and games should be no problem with this kind of connection. It also has the 2.5 lan ports for both internet and ethernet on the router, and an ethernet on each of the satellites for when you want to go wired and zoom.

While still Wi-Fi 7, this cheaper Orbi only supports up to Dual-Band while the others are Tri-Band and again, I don't think is something most consumers should worry about, we only just found out what Wi-Fi means, afterall. Wi-Fi 7 is still in precious few devices, and these are backwards compatible anyway. If you're buying these for your home you're more likely after better speeds and less dead zones, and they should deliver that nicely even if you don't own a single Wi-Fi 7 device.

As they're on the cutting edge, Wi-Fi 7 routers don't tend to be cheap. Our favourite comparable mesh system router is the Amazon Eero Max 7, and while it's easy to use and fast it's also $600 USD. If this mesh system from NetGear manages to come in as half as good it'll still be excellent value.

Over the decades, astronomers have faced the increasingly tough problem of satellites appearing in their view of the universe. The rapid growth of Starlink, SpaceX's web-from-space system, isn't just impacting countless pictures using visible light but also those in other parts of the spectrum. A recent study of 76 million images shows that the satellites are affecting the work of radio astronomers, even at frequencies that the satellites don't transmit at.

Take a photograph of the night sky, far away from any urban lights, and you stand a good chance of capturing the telltale streak of a satellite passing overhead. For any ground-based telescope capturing the faint photons of visible light from distant stars, it's an unavoidable problem because the satellites will always reflect the Sun's light.

When it comes to observing space in the radio spectrum, though, it should be far less of a problem because satellite companies are forbidden to transmit in specific frequency windows. However, a study by Curtin University in Australia (via Space) shows that SpaceX's Starlink satellites are "significantly interfering with radio astronomy observations, potentially impacting discovery and research".

Over four months, the research team amassed a total of 76 million radio wave images from a prototype section of the Square Kilometre Array observatory and upon analysis of the data, discovered that "[i]n some datasets … up to 30 per cent of our images showed interference from a Starlink satellite."

To make matters worse, the Starlink satellites were emitting signals in radio bands that they shouldn't be. "Some satellites were detected emitting in bands where no signals are supposed to be present at all, such as the 703 satellites we identified at 150.8 MHz, which is meant to be protected for radio astronomy," said study lead Dylan Grigg.

"Because they may come from components like onboard electronics and they’re not part of an intentional signal, astronomers can’t easily predict them or filter them out."

Professor Steven Tingay, a co-author of the research paper, points out that SpaceX isn't doing anything nefarious or the like. "It is important to note that Starlink is not violating current regulations, so is doing nothing wrong. Discussions we have had with SpaceX on the topic have been constructive."

Starlink isn't the only satellite-based internet service provider, nor is it the only satellite company routinely launching new devices into low Earth orbit, but few companies (if any) are launching on the same scale as SpaceX. Grigg notes that during the study period, a total of 477 Starlink satellites were sent into orbit, and another study has shown that the newest Starlink models create 32 times more radio interference than previous designs.

The number of electronic devices whizzing around our planet, transmitting within the permitted windows of the radio spectrum, is well over 10,000, and a significant portion of them are almost certainly going to be unintentionally emitting signals outside of the regulated zones.

As Professor Tingay says, "current International Telecommunication Union regulations focus on intentional transmissions and do not cover this type of unintended emission. We hope this study adds support for international efforts to update policies that regulate the impact of this technology on radio astronomy research, that are currently underway."

Future launches may well have structures in place to greatly minimise, or even remove, the problem, but the thousands of satellites already in orbit will continue to be a problem for radio astronomers. The incredible benefits of space-based internet and global communications are plain for all to see, though too much so in the field of space research.

Netgear's current crop of Nighthawk Wi-Fi routers—and there are a lot of them—all have the kind of looks that, were they gaming PCs, might hide ridiculous amounts of rendering power behind their otherwise anonymous black exteriors. And in a way they do, if you replace the word 'rendering' with 'networking'.

No wait, come back. Networking is really interesting, I promise. Otherwise PC Gamer wouldn't keep getting me to review these things. This new model from Netgear, the Nighthawk RS600 is a mid-priced Wi-Fi 7 model, though, in a world where something like the TP-Link Archer GE800 can sell for £700, calling it that doesn't mean it's exactly low-cost. You can pick up a cheap router that gives you the Wi-Fi 7 features for much less, but the reason you'd pick up something like this is because you're looking for large amounts of network throughput and stability, plus extras such as security and the ability to deal with multi-gigabit internet connections.

What you get is the same old black plastic hexagon as the rest of the Netgear range, with no visible antennas. The RS600 does come with a silver top instead of a black one, and its vents are perhaps more obvious than those of other models such as the $300 Nighthawk RS300, but the wisdom of Netgear's design choices is in how it sits in your home.

If you've ever tried to find a home—a proper home, not just chucking it behind the sofa—for the flat style router with four or more aerials sticking up from it will know that it's not a particularly easy thing to do. The GE800 is a particular nightmare in this regard, as it's basically a cube, so high do its wings reach. Unless you have a spare Ikea Kallax unit knocking around it can be tricky to find enough shelf space for it, and it's going to end up on the floor.

Not so with the Netgear, which has a small footprint and can be placed either vertical or horizontal anywhere you can get power and cables to it. It requires a power brick (which is nice and small), and the cable is around five feet long, so you'll need to keep it within that sort of range of a socket, as well as any fibre or cable modem you're using. Finding the right place for your router is an involved business, and that's before you even consider the best placement for Wi-Fi performance.

Luckily, the RS600 has a lot of Wi-Fi to go around. It claims 18 Gbps of combined throughput speed, and has a 10Gbps input socket to feed it. That makes it almost as (theoretically) fast as the top-end Nighthawk RS700S router. Though the more expensive model has other benefits, such as a slightly greater coverage volume (3,500 Sq ft against 3,300 sq ft) and the ability to talk to 200 devices at once compared to the RS600's 150.

Setup is done through a phone app—you'll need to create a Netgear account and then connect to the router's default Wi-Fi network, after which everything happens more or less automatically until you need to input your network credentials—there's a lot of time spent watching a blue bar creep across the screen while it 'makes sure your mobile device is connected' and constantly asks you to 'wait two minutes'. There's an on/off switch on the back of the router you're going to need to remember to press to make the whole thing work, but that's the most difficult thing. Then you're going to need to name your Wi-Fi network (an opportunity to broadcast messages into your neighbours' homes), create a new password, create an admin account and password, then answer some security questions. It's a very smooth process, and includes an automatic firmware update check—twice.

There's a sticker on the end of the router that provides information about the default network name and password, and which indicates that it can be peeled off —it can't. The sticker held onto the plastic shell of the device like a limpet on a rock, and if you're fussy about the appearance of your router this is going to be annoying.

It also has Netgear's Smart Connect enabled by default, which collects all the various wireless networks it's capable of emitting into one, and allows the router to choose which it assigns to a particular device. This is fine if you're not fussy about always getting the best one, and prefer an uncluttered Wi-Fi connection page on your devices, but you'll want to turn it off if you need to make sure your gaming PC, for example, connects to the 6 GHz or 5 GHz network to make the most of its speed.

And as for that speed, well Wi-Fi 7 is no longer new so we're not as impressed by the vast throughput figures as once we were. Average internet speeds also haven't kept up with advances in router tech, so hooking that 10 Gbps socket up to an average 70 Mbps connection can still feel a little wasteful. What routers like this excel at is acting as a hub so that your gaming PC, laptop, tablet, smartphone, NAS, media server, games console, multiple smartphones, smart home devices, internet-enabled fridge and coffee machine, plus any children you may have (they're fitted with Wi-Fi chips at birth these days) can all communicate with each other and the wider internet at once.

These speeds, recorded between two Wi-Fi 7 PCs both connected to the router on each of its three bands, are pretty good, meaning that you'll be flinging around gigabit streams of data with wild abandon if you've got a need for that sort of thing.

As has often been the case with the Wi-Fi 7 routers we've tested, the 5 GHz band comes out on top when both PCs were in the same room and again when a bit of distance and a wall or two are put between them, though the 6 GHz one is no slouch and could be kept as the exclusive domain of your games PC to avoid congestion from other devices. Hopefully this adds a degree of future-proofing to the device, though it's not as fast as the big TP-Link, and it will make an excellent upgrade over that flimsy thing your ISP lumbered you with.

You know what they say: If you want something done properly, do it yourself. Two brothers-in-law based out of Saline, Michigan, appear to have taken this principle to heart—as, after having had their fill of relying on Comcast for their high-speed internet, they've started an ISP of their very own.

After becoming frustrated with the slow upload speeds and what he perceived to be an unreliable connection offered by Comcast's Xfinity service, Samuel Herman—a Saline resident and chief operating officer of his father's local construction company—decided to take matters into his own hands (via Ars Technica). After discovering that no fiber ISP was competing with Comcast in his area, he enlisted the help of his brother-in-law, Alexander Baciu, to create an ISP that aims to provide a cheaper and more reliable alternative.

"All throughout my life pretty much, I've had to deal with Xfinity's bullcrap, them not being able to handle the speeds that we need," Herman told Ars Technica. "Many times we would have to call Comcast and let them know our bandwidth was slowing down... then they would say, 'OK, we'll refresh the system.' So then it would work again for a week to two weeks, and then again we'd have the same issues."

"We have spoken to all of these Internet service providers and asked them to come and service these areas. I knew that there was a dire need in this area and that everybody was sick of the Xfinity BS."

Given that the construction business is their game, particularly the installation of fiber lines and their associated conduits, the two decided to pivot their knowledge of local infrastructure into creating a fiber broadband provider of their very own. "We kept on talking. We're like, hey, we're doing this work for other people, why not?" said Baciu.

In August of 2024, the pair signed a contract with a firm that provides IP address assignments, backhaul services, and connectivity for ISPs. They also hired technical assistants and software engineers to handle the networking requirements. Just six months after their newly-minted broadband provider, Prime-One, began operations, the pair have already gained over 100 customers.

Prime-One currently has 15 employees and provides unlimited data connections to the local area starting at 500 Mbps for $75 a month, all the way up to a 5 Gbps connection for $110, along with an Optical Network Terminal, a modem, and a router. "We are 100 percent fiber optic," says Baciu. "Everything that we're doing is all underground. "We're not doing aerial because we really want to protect the infrastructure and make sure we're having a reliable connection."

The company also offers phone support, as opposed to the mostly online chat support offered by Comcast. Currently, the network is capable of servicing around 1,500 homes in Saline over 75 miles of fiber optic cables—but Prime-One is planning to expand to 4,000 homes in the near future, along with providing connection opportunities to multi-unit residential buildings as well.

So, it's a hometown hero story all round, then. Everyone loves the idea of a scrappy underdog taking on the big players, but in this case, the two underdogs involved had the technical know-how, the will, and the funding to succeed. On Comcast's part, however, it looks like the pair might have spurred the competition into a response:

"We have upgraded our network in this area and offer multi-gig speeds there, and across Michigan, as part of our national upgrade that's been rolling out", a spokesperson said. Meanwhile, MetroNet and Frontier, two competing ISPs, have also been expanding their fiber line construction into The City of Saline, although neither appears to be serving the zones Prime-One operates in currently.

And as for the future? Herman says that "we have plans we cannot disclose at this moment, but we do have a plan to expand." Sounds like this David vs Goliath battle has some ways to go yet, then. Good luck, chaps.

Unless you're a networking engineer, it's unlikely you've thought about your router in some time. After all, working tech is working tech, and if it's still delivering the speeds your internet provider promised, why change it? Cyber criminals, that's why. Especially if yours happens to be a Cisco Linksys model.

That's according to the FBI, which has released a document [PDF warning] advising that not only are EOL (End of Life) routers particularly open to attack from nefarious internet forces in general, but specifically mentions multiple Cisco Linksys models as "vulnerable to compromise" (via Hot Hardware). The routers mentioned are as follows:

• Cisco Linksys E1200
• Cisco Linksys E2500
• Cisco Linksys E1000
• Cisco Linksys E4200
• Cisco Linksys E1500
• Cisco Linksys E300
• Cisco Linksys E3200
• Cisco Linksys WRT320N
• Cisco Linksys E1550
• Cisco Linksys WRT610
• Cisco Linksys E100
• Cisco Linksys M10
• Cisco Linksys WRT310N

"Threat actors exploit known vulnerabilities to compromise EOL routers, install malware, and use the routers in a botnet they control to launch coordinated attacks or sell access to the devices as proxy services," the document warns.

"The FBI recommends users replace compromised devices with newer models or prevent infection by disabling remote administration and rebooting the router."

Given just how many people cling on to ageing routers until the day their ISP finally replaces them, I'd say it's worth having a look at routers used by your nearest and dearest, too. I'm pretty sure my grandparents use a clockwork router from 1853 (or thereabouts) for their home network, so I'll be certain to dig around underneath the cables next time I'm over for a quiet cup of tea and give them a top router recommendation for their regular Counter-Strike 2 sessions.

While TP-Link routers are not specifically named, they too have been in the news recently regarding security concerns. US congressman Raja Krishnamoorthi has repeatedly called for a ban of TP-Link devices linked to Chinese cyberattacks, most recently in regards to a "worst in nation's history" US telecoms hack revealed late last year.

Networking might be the least sexy of all hardware concerns, but it's worth remembering that your router is the last port of call between the worldwide web and your personal devices. Best to give it a check over—and most certainly a firmware update— even if your router doesn't appear on this list, don't you think?

If you own a Netgear router it may well be time to check for updates, as the company has released a security advisory to update the firmware as soon as possible on several models.

While details are thin on the ground, it appears two critical remote code execution vulnerabilities have been patched for multiple WiFi router models (via Bleeping Computer). I've listed the latest firmware updates next to the affected routers below, so if you're a Netgear user it's worth a quick check to see if your router is affected, and if it's using the latest version.

To check your router's firmware version, follow the instructions on the Netgear site.

If you own an affected router and the firmware differs from the listed versions above, it's time to get updating. To do so, visit Netgear support and begin typing in your model number, before selecting it from the drop down menu.

Once you're on your router's support page, click Downloads, and then under Current Versions select the first option. Then follow the Release Notes instructions to download and install the latest firmware version to your device.

Netgear says "the authentication bypass vulnerability remains if you do not complete all recommended steps," so make sure to double check your new firmware has installed correctly after following the instructions above.

Out of the affected models listed, the XR variants are considered gaming routers, with the XR1000 Nighthawk Pro being the most recent. A router is often regarded as a "set and forget" sort of device, and I know it's been many moons since I last checked if my particular (non-Netgear) router was up to date.

So even for the rest of us, it's worth a quick check for updates, isn't it? Security starts at the first potential entry point, and your home router is the first sentry on the outer walls of your internet perimeter. Better safe than sorry, I'm sure you'll agree.

While the TikTok US ban debacle rolls on, it looks like TP-Link is being considered for the same treatment. After a letter signed by two US congressmen called for a ban of TP-Link devices last summer for having "unusual vulnerabilities" linked to Chinese cyberattacks, one of its signees is now voicing continued concerns.

Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, an American attorney and politician serving as a representative for Illinois since 2017, has spoken to CNBC regarding what he perceives as an ongoing threat to national security, with no action taken since concerns were raised to the US Department of Commerce last year.

"I am not aware of any plans to get them out," he said. "The PRC has every intent to collect this data on Americans and they will, why give them another backdoor?"

TP-Link is thought to have roughly 65% of the market share of US routers for homes and small businesses. Previously, the US government had mandated that telecom equipment manufactured by Huawei, another China-based communications provider, be banned from sale and import in the US over similar national security concerns.

"I am wondering whether something similar needs to be done, at least in regards to national security agencies, Department of Defense, and Intelligence," said Krishnamoorthi.

"It just doesn't make sense for the US government to be buying the routers."

The fresh calls come in the wake of a "worst in nation's history" telecoms hack, the details of which were revealed late last year. A China-linked hacking group dubbed "Salt Typhoon" was identified by the FBI and CISA as having infiltrated US telecoms networks by manipulating backdoors in existing communication equipment.

The hackers were initially said to have compromised the communications of politicians, campaign advisors, and other high-profile targets through the Verizon network, although it was later revealed that the hack was much more widespread.

Certainly, the US telecoms network now looks like a much leakier ship than initially thought, and the widespread use of TP-Link routers and their alleged vulnerabilities is a scary thought.

However, with the network itself being comprised of huge amounts of ageing equipment from multiple manufacturers, it strikes that a "rip and replace" policy, as was metered out to Huawei's products, would be extremely difficult to enact—especially given their share in the US domestic market.

Still, Krishnamoorthi couldn't be making himself clearer at this point:

"I would not buy a TP-Link router," he said. "I would not have that in my home."

As a renter all too familiar with the faraday cages that make up much of Bath's Georgian architecture, I've found TP-Link WiFi adapters often come in clutch (that Bridgerton fanfic isn't going to read itself, and certainly not on a dodgy internet connection). Unfortunately these adapters, alongside many of TP-Link's networking products, seem to be extremely vulnerable to hackers.

It gets worse: thousands of TP-Link routers have been hijacked by hackers working on behalf of the Chinese government, according to Ars Technica. The affected routers have been leveraged into a botnet that's hammering Microsoft Azure accounts with password spray attacks, sending massive amounts of login attempts from a rotating roster of IP addresses.

A dizzying 16,000 compromised devices have been pulled together into what's been dubbed the 7777 (or Quad7) botnet. The name is a reference to the TCP port that exposes the intrusion on the compromised device, and this name was coined by the researcher who first documented it—back in October 2023.

As for Azure, Microsoft's cloud services have already been the subject of similar attacks, most recently leading to the illicit access of email accounts belonging to a number of US government agencies. In that instance, hacker group Storm-0558 was identified as the culprit, and a recent blog post from Microsoft says this same group has been using credentials scooped up by the 7777 botnet, suggesting a "close working relationship" between the hacker group and whoever is steering the bots.

Once hackers get in via a compromised account, they've then been observed by Microsoft to move "laterally within the network," scooping up more data and even attempting to install remote access trojan horses so they can hop back in at a later date.

According to security researchers at Sekoia TDR and Team Cymru, the 7777 botnet was active as recently as August this year. Furthermore, affected routers were found all over the world; the highest portion of compromised devices was found in Bulgaria, though Russia, the US, and Ukraine follow closely behind. This far flung web of devices makes it especially difficult to pin down the source of the attack, or that an attack is happening at all.

On top of all of that, it's not yet clear how the devices involved are becoming infected and drawn into the botnet in the first place. However, before you punt your TP-Link WiFi adapter down the Mendips, it's worth noting that compromised devices may be disinfected, at least temporarily.

As the malware involved can't write to the storage of a TP-Link device, a simple reboot could potentially cut the cord — until hackers try to brute force the back door open once more, so it's best to reboot your devices periodically. It's simple advice, but serves as one more example of why the words 'have you tried turning it off and on again' endure.

While many other manufacturers like their Wi-Fi routers to look like mechanical spiders or spaceships, giving little thought to the practicalities of keeping them on narrow shelves or dusting them, Netgear's design department is more restrained. The RS300—an affordable Wi-Fi 7 router inasmuch as you don't actually fall over when you see how much they want for it—is very much the Nighthawk RS700S's little cousin.

There's a strong family resemblance in the upright stance, rounded-diamond cross section, and the lack of aerials, as well as a very similar layout with blinking status lights on the front which can be turned off with a single button-press. The RS300 comes from a different part of the gene pool, however, with slower speeds on both wired and wireless connections.

By slower, however, it still means fast. This is a Wi-Fi 7 router and everything is measured in Gbps, faster than almost everyone's internet connection and more than you need for streaming or even gaming (though downloading from Steam will always benefit from greater speeds). We're seeing more and more gaming laptops and desktops (as well as phones and tablets) come equipped with Wi-Fi 7 cards, however, so it's nice to see this latest version of a mature technology becoming mainstream enough for budget models to emerge.

Still, if you have an internet connection greater than 2.5 Gbps (in which case, can we come to your house?) you should consider something else. You won't find a 10 Gbps input or output port on the RS300, so if you want to run a high-speed home network you'll be limited to 2.5 Gbps throughput.

For most people this absolutely will not matter, and the ability to hook up modern devices to the 6 GHz Wi-Fi network and enjoy speeds of up to a claimed 5.8 Gbps means the router is very unlikely to be any kind of bottleneck.

In testing, with two Wi-Fi 7 devices connected wirelessly and acting as a server and client in iPerf3, to see how quickly data took to be transferred between them at various distances (in the same room, and further away with a wall and floor in between) over the different bands, the RS300 provides respectable, though not jaw-dropping, speeds.

This performance puts it behind more expensive routers such as the TP-Link GE800, but not too far behind. Think of it as an RTX 4070 up against an RTX 4090. The model that's twice the price is faster, sure, but it's probably not worth it for everyday use.

The RS300 comes in compact and restrained packaging, with a slim box-within-a-box containing the bundled power adapter and Ethernet cable laying on top of the router itself. A ribbon has been carefully placed underneath the plastic casing as it lays in the cardboard embrace, allowing you to easily lift it out. Other than this, and some plastic wrapping, it's a lightweight offering, matching the router itself, which is less than half the weight of the TP-Link Archer GE800 and easy enough to pick up with one hand. This, combined with an ergonomic shape that resembles a flattened gridiron or rugby ball, makes it possibly the first Wi-Fi 7 router that could be thrown with any degree of accuracy, something that clearly needs to be taken into account in all future buying decisions.

Once it's out of the box you'll want to set it up, and Netgear has years of experience in making this as easy and straightforward as possible. A QR code is helpfully stuck right on top of the unit (and repeated on the base), along with a default SSID and password, and you can use this to connect up the Netgear Nighthawk smartphone app, which will allow you to input an admin password and set some security questions. Then you need to try to remember the username and password for your broadband service, if needed, and you can adjust the settings of the Wi-Fi broadcasts if you want to deviate from the default. It is extremely easy, and Netgear gets a big gold star for making it that way, but it can take a long time especially if there's a firmware update involved. Luckily, it's the sort of thing most people will only need to do once.

From there, you can build your network. With a claimed coverage of 2,000 sq. ft and the ability to talk to 100 concurrent devices, it makes an excellent hub around which everything else can cluster. If a wired network is your thing, there are four Ethernet ports on the back, two of them capable of full 2.5 Gbps speeds, with the other two limited to a 'mere' 1 Gbps. That's still fast enough for most uses, and the benefits of a more stable connection when hooking up streaming devices such as smart TVs can outweigh the inconvenience of running one more cable.

Wireless performance is a much less stable thing, as our homes were simply not designed for optimum data transfer. One day, perhaps not too long from now, all apartments, bungalows and townhouses will be completely empty and open plan, with no walls, doors or partitions of any kind; the router will be suspended precisely in the centre, and circles inscribed on the (single) floor—painted white, naturally—so you know exactly how far away you are. Today is not that day, so we have to put up with our imperfect homes and the problems they pose for wireless data transmission.

To do this, you can separate out the bands so all three have different names and passwords, rather than allowing the router to manage them all as one SSID (which Netgear calls Smart Connect, and is on by default).

Something we're starting to see more of with Wi-Fi 7 routers is a proliferation of subscription services, and the RS300 is no exception. You get Wi-Fi encryption as standard, of course, but after a free trial period you'll have to cough up some extra cash to keep using the Armor security services and Smart Parental Controls. It's an annoying upsell, and some companies include this stuff in the asking price.

Netgear has created a Wi-Fi 7 router here that does a lot right, and comes in at a very good price… for a Wi-Fi 7 router. It may not have the absolute fastest hardware imaginable, but it easily outstrips average internet connections, and even with IoT devices in the mix 100 concurrent devices is a lot, so why do you need more?

Two US Congressmen have called on the Biden administration to launch an investigation over concerns that networking products made by the widely used TP-Link brand could be used to covertly spy on Americans, or be used for cyber attacks.

Republican Representative John Moolenaar and Democratic Representative Raja Krishnamoorthi have formally requested an investigation from the US Department of Commerce citing national security risks. According to a letter posted by the Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party (via Reuters), "TP-Link’s unusual degree of vulnerabilities and required compliance with PRC law are in and of themselves disconcerting".

TP-Link products are widely used in the US, and can be found inside critical facilities, including US military bases.

Last year, TP-Link routers were used to launch an attack on European foreign affairs organizations. TP-Link firmware was infected with malware, giving attackers the ability to run shell commands, access files and relay communications between devices on the network. TP-Link is not the only manufacturer that can be exploited. Other manufacturers including Cisco and Netgear have also been used to launch attacks from foreign adversaries.

The request for an investigation is just the latest in the US government's actions against Chinese companies, with Huawei and ZTE being forced out of the US market. TikTok is another well known example of a Chinese company facing similar spying concerns.

Most end users are at least somewhat aware of the need to keep devices and PC software updated for security reasons, but there is far less awareness around the potential for router based attacks. I'd place a wager and suggest that a majority of home users have never updated their router's firmware. Now would be a good time to start.

We PC gamers often like to flirt with F1 driving, from sim racing to straight-up brand sponsorship and partnership. We tend to be a techy bunch, too. So I was a little angry at myself for not already knowing that, as Ex-F1 Senior Systems Engineer Dan "EngineMode11" explains, "An F1 car has an IP address."

I mean, duh, of course F1 cars have IP addresses. Right? We're talking about some of the most sophisticated automobiles on the planet, designed to chop sharp turns at well over 100 mph and quickly climb back up to 200+ mph, all without spattering person across the asphalt.

If everyday dawdler vehicles are now packed to the brim with electronics, including wireless tech (and they are), you can bet that F1 cars are, too. And we already know that F1 teams like Alpine painstakingly gather shedloads of car sensor data for analysis. What, did we expect F1 cars to pit-stop-and-USB? 

No, much is done wirelessly, apparently using the F1 car's IP address. Or, to be more precise, using one of its multiple IP addresses, because, as Dan explains in a reply, "there are several depending on what you want to do."

What you probably don't want to do is blow up the car's engine, though. And that, Dan implies, is something that might have actually happened. "The fear" about having an F1 car with an IP address, he explains, "isn't from external bad actors. It's internally, from the electronics team, who definitely wouldn't accidentally connect to the wrong car and flash the ECU of one running on the test bed instead of the sim, that's definitely never happened."

An ECU, for reference, is a car's Electronic Control Unit, which controls much of its engine's systems, such as the ignition. Now, thankfully, I've never actually had anything go wrong when flashing a motherboard BIOS, which is why I'm not too fussed about doing so. If my motherboard was connected to a combustion engine, though? I'm not so sure I'd pull the trigger. And I certainly wouldn't like the ability to accidentally connect to it remotely and do so.

When asked what happens when a running F1 car has its ECU flashed, Dan has a straightforward answer: "New engine," followed by an explosion emoji. Pretty simple, then: Check you're connected to the correct IP address when flashing an F1 car's circuitry. 

Let's just hope there's no flashing going on track-side (no, not like that, get your mind out of the gutter) because, apparently, track-side wireless management is a mess at F1 events: "I had the unfortunate job of trying to deploy WiFi trackside and the amount of noise and overlapping networks in the pitlane gave me an aneurysm."

I dunno, I'm still wrapping my head around the fact that I didn't realise F1 cars are zooming around out there with itty bitty IP addresses circulating the digital space. Information I now know, that I may never need to use, and that now you know, too.

Exterior, space. Stars twinkle. A serene planet hangs in the blackness. A Star Destroyer passes across the camera's view to orchestral music. The shuttle of evil Sith Lord Ray Tracingus flies by with a scream of engines, enters the destroyer's bay and lands, folding its wings up as it does so. Wi-Fi reception aboard the heavily armed warship improves considerably.

Yes, TP-Link's latest and greatest Wi-Fi 7 router, the Archer GE800, is what you might call a distinctive shape, and if you put it on display with some model TIE Interceptors and a CR-90 corvette or two it might blend in, or at least have people wondering which part of the expanded universe it comes from.

This is no simple shuttlecraft, however, but a fully armed and operational... [that's enough -ed] battle... er... Wi-Fi 7 router with five fast Ethernet ports for smuggling data away from Imperial probe droids and capable of downloading the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs [you're fired -ed]. Look, the antennas are merged into two panels that stick up like the Netgear Nighthawks of old, OK? And they look like wings.

The box is huge, and emblazoned with 'dominate the competition'—a slogan most probably aimed at gamers unless there's some kind of competitive networking event we're unaware of. And while a Wi-Fi World Cup might be fun, we suspect a certain amount of performance-enhancing plugs might be involved. 

Your first challenge is to get it out of the plastic wrapping, which clings tightly to the angles and flat plates of the router. It's fully assembled, with no antennas to screw in, but you'll be forced to put it down on a desk before committing it to the cupboard or shelf just to take in the sheer majestic size of the thing. Footprint-wise, it's the size of a small laptop, but a laptop that rises six inches into the air. Between the wings there's even an active cooling fan—it really is like a laptop.

An Ethernet cable and a phone SIM tool—for poking the recessed reset button—are included, plus a power brick which came with a US-style three-pin plug that connects to the brick with a cloverleaf connection—watch out in your region if you have to replace the cable, as cloverleafs are less common than kettle leads. One of the 10 Gbps Ethernet ports is for the WAN hookup, but there's also an SFP+ port for direct fibre connections (the one on the review model is filled with an easily removable rubber bung) and you can even combo the two together for unheard of amounts of internet. Setup is a case of connecting to the Wi-Fi hotspot using the password (or QR code) printed on the bottom, and using the phone app or web interface to create passwords and go through a few simple questions. It's a very fast and easy process.

Assuming the Ethernet ports are at the back, it's one of the few routers to be deeper than it is wide, and as you're going to want the front and back of the unit to be accessible—there are buttons for WPS, Wi-Fi switch-off and more on the front, plus a USB port and on/off switch alongside the Ethernet on the back—it's going to be better installed sideways, so that it doesn't hang over the edge of a shelf and you can appreciate the RGB.

Oh yes. The coloured lighting plague that has led to desktop PC cases looking like Fourth of July celebrations and laptops projecting manufacturers' logos onto our knees has taken root on this router, with multi-hued LEDs buried in the vertical antenna plates and behind grilles that now, to return to the previous tortured Star Wars metaphor, look like engines. 

You can turn it off. There's a dedicated button. Use it.

The Archer GE800 is certainly not cheap, but it certainly is fast, and while the benefits of Wi-Fi 7 may be best experienced on a network with a particularly fat connection to the wider internet and a lot of separate devices to share those megabits between, a router like this is an upgrade for anyone still labouring away with Wi-Fi 5. One of the Ethernet ports is a ‘gaming port' which will prioritise your traffic if you plug your gaming PC into it, but really with a router operating at this level network congestion should be the least of your problems. There's automatic QoS on-board too, which claims to detect and optimise gaming traffic without you having to interfere—though you can tweak it—and Homeshield security. You even get access to the Gamers Private Network VPN service.

The published wireless throughput figures are as huge as the box it comes in, offering a whopping 11.5 gigs of 6 GHz bandwidth to play with, and over a gig on the longer-ranged 2.4 GHz band, which will be useful for that relative who hasn't updated their phone since 2010 (it is of course backwards compatible) and for when your fridge downloads a firmware update. You're not going to get all that in one go, even if you're transferring data to a networked SSD array, but it can be shared out among a lot of devices without succumbing to slowdown or latency. Some of this capability comes from using the latest version of the Wi-Fi spec, and some from a Qualcomm chipset that not so long ago we'd have been calling a flagship smartphone.

In testing, the GE800 manages something close to a perfect score, with no weird peaks and troughs. Each network gets faster as we move up the GHz scale, and there's a distinct drop off in transmission speed as the client device is moved away from the server and a few walls and a floor are put in between. It's all exactly as the Force predicted.

It may be large and expensive (though it's actually not the priciest router on the market), but there's no arguing with the results. If your wallet and shelving can take it, and you have a fast internet connection you want to distribute among multiple devices that can use Wi-Fi 7—or think you will have in the near future—then the TP-Link Archer GE800 has got your back with this one.

It is the dawning of the age of Wi-Fi 7, but it's taking time to become popular and buying a Wi-Fi 6E router can be a good—and more cost-effective—way to boost your Wi-Fi speeds from Wi-Fi 5 or, heaven forbid, Wi-Fi 4. 

TP-Link has produced a striking-looking router in the AXE75, taking the standard rectangular wedge with antennas up the back so beloved of tech designers and adding into the mix a geometric pattern and a smooth, angled area. It stands out from other routers that follow the same basic shape, but that pattern is sure going to collect dust. Around the back there's nothing unusual, with four gigabit Ethernet ports, a gigabit WAN port, power connector, on/off switch, and further buttons for WPS, reset, and turning the LEDs and Wi-Fi on and off.

The router comes as an already assembled unit, though there are individual plastic sheaths tightly wrapped around each of the six antennas that you'll spend ages picking at with your fingernails to remove. Why they don't slide straight off is a mystery. There's also a peel-off sheet of plastic over a section on top of the unit, that you might not even notice until it bubbles up. Power comes via an external adapter with a cable about 1.5m long, so you'll need to position the router at least that close to a socket.

Setup is very straightforward. Plug it in and switch it on, then use the Wi-Fi network name and password printed on the bottom, or the QR code, to connect the TP-Link Tether app on your phone. Set an admin password, then (in a step that foxed me for a moment because I'm dumb) enter that password, and you're in. You can also do this from a web browser, and once you've got access to the admin page you can separate out the three Wi-Fi bands, which are bundled together by default, and enable the guest network and parental controls.

Wi-Fi 6E is Wi-Fi 6 that extends into the 6GHz band, which can give you additional 160 MHz channels to play with. Wi-Fi 7 would double these to 320 MHz wide, but even so Wi-Fi 6E gives you a lot of extra capacity over previous versions. As higher frequencies have a harder time penetrating the bits of our homes that make them homes—the walls and floors—the 6 GHz channels are better for fast, short-range links, such as a gaming PC in the same room as the router. This, in turn, frees up capacity on the 5 GHz network for your phones and tablets, and on the 2.4 GHz spectrum for IoT and legacy devices. 

OFDMA, or orthogonal frequency-division multiple access—a new Wi-Fi 6 technology—allows these channels to be further split up if a device isn't using them to their fullest, for simultaneous low-data-rate transmission from several users. 

This means a Wi-Fi 6 network is better at handling lots of light-use devices, such as smart lightbulbs and coffee machines, while you keep the 6 GHz network free for those multi-gig Steam downloads and low-ping gaming sessions. Another bit of cleverness, MU-MIMO, which allows multiple nodes and antennas to communicate with each other simultaneously, came in with Wi-Fi 5, but in Wi-Fi 6 and 6E is can be applied in both the down and up link directions, instead of just down as was the case in Wi-Fi 5. This means you'll get a boost in capacity for uploads as well as downloads, which is important for keeping latency down when gaming.

The best thing about getting a Wi-Fi 6E router now rather than a Wi-Fi 7 model is that you'll save a bit of cash, as the slightly older tech doesn't attract the price premium of the new hotness. The TP-Link AXE75 is one of the more reasonably priced Wi-Fi 6E routers on the market, with Netgear's RAXE300 going for over £100 more, Asus' RT-AXE7800 adding £70 to your bill and Acer's Predator Connect W6 needing £40 more in terms of outlay.

These results, carried out in a reasonably modern suburban house without a Faraday cage built into the walls and not a tinfoil hat in sight, are a little odd. The 5 GHz close-by result is faster than the 6 GHz band's speed, and we'd usually expect it to be the other way around. As the two networks share a hypothetical throughput speed they should be allowing data to pass at about the same rate, especially up close. That 5 GHz connection is seriously fast, however, so it's not worth moaning about—it's unusual to see a wireless connection that can actually outstrip a wired one in real-world use.

As fast fibre internet connections continue their rollout, a router like this increasingly makes sense, as internet connections get faster and are shared between more devices, and as games get larger and take longer to download. It can also make a useful hub for a home network if you're running a media server or networked backup solution, and the ability to handle multiple connections at once is almost as important as straight-line speed. 

A Wi-Fi 6E router is starting to look like yesterdays news compared to the very best Wi-Fi 7 models, but networking equipment isn't a sexy purchase, and if you'd rather save your money toward RGB RAM or a step up the graphics card hierarchy, then getting one that supplies enough throughput and the extra features of Wi-Fi 6E is a good way to do it. 

In our testing, the AXE75 provided a particularly fast 5 GHz connection when uncongested and up-close, meaning gamers with a speedy internet connection will be able to download over wireless without suffering too much in the way of slowdown. And the price is low enough that if you're after a speedy gaming router on a budget, this neat little TP-Link Archer will hit the target.

Is there anything Asus doesn't make? The Taiwanese company has knocked out everything from 80486 motherboards to PhysX cards, to some excellent gaming laptops, and you'd expect its Wi-Fi routers to be top quality too. For the most part, this new Wi-Fi 7 model is exactly that, but it comes with a specific omission.

Since Wi-Fi 6E, routers have been able to broadcast on three frequencies. There are the common 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands, and a 6GHz band that offers greater speeds at a shorter range. It's ideal for a gaming PC in the same room as the router, and frees up the others for phones, tablets, and the IoT devices that are increasingly cluttering up our homes. This router doesn't have that band, but does that mean you're missing out?

Not really. The 6GHz band is fast, but it's also shorter-ranged, and doesn't penetrate solid objects as well. Wi-Fi 7 routers have some clever tricks, however, that mean you can get excellent speeds—certainly faster than you'd need on an average internet connection—on the other bands. 

There are the 320MHz-wide channels, which double the potential bandwidth from Wi-Fi 6 and leave Wi-Fi 5 in the dust. You get 4K-QAM that alters the phase and amplitude of the Wi-Fi signal to squeeze more data into the same space, and MLO (Multi-Link Operation) that allows a client to connect via 2.4GHz and 5GHz at the same time. Even without 6GHz (which isn't approved for use in all countries) Wi-Fi 7 is faster, more reliable, and has less latency as long as you have the equipment to take advantage of it. 

Yes, you're going to need a new PC, phone, tablet, smart fridge, whatever to take full advantage of Wi-Fi 7 (though it is of course backward compatible), whether you connect to the 6GHz band or not, but sharing your current internet connection in a new way might not be enough to tip you over the edge into upgrade heaven. Better to get a mighty multi-gigabit fibre connection first, then sort out the Wi-Fi later.

To the Asus RT-BE88U then, and it's a fairly standard-looking Wi-Fi router of the kind Wednesday Addams might keep as a pet. It's black, a wide sort of wedge shape, there are twinkly lights, it has a vent grille on top and angular legs/antennas sprout from three of its sides. The antennas have a sharp-looking design with a hole cut through them, so they look like the kind of sword Hawkeye might use after he got his tattoos, and need to be tightened up quite a lot when you assemble the router to prevent them flopping forward like you forgot to water them for a month. Standing tall and proud, their black and bronze colour scheme is attractive, but it's still something you're going to place on a shelf then forget about.

Around the back, there's an unusual addition for a consumer router in the form of a SFP+ port. This stands for Small Form-factor Pluggable, and is a hot-swappable network interface that's used for specific connections, such as copper wire or fibre optics, through a modular connector. There's a 10Gb Ethernet WAN port right next to it, which is going to be the plug of choice for most people and almost certainly good enough for many more years of internet upgrades. There are a lot of other network ports on the back too, making this router an excellent choice as a hub if you're building or upgrading a wired network. You get four 2.5Gbit Ethernet connections, and four more gigabit ones. 

LAN4 is a gaming port, which you'll want to plug your PC into to enjoy higher priority for your gaming traffic if you're running a congested network. The proximity of the rear two Wi-Fi antennas to the Ethernet array means getting your finger underneath to remove cables from a packed rack of cables can be a little tricky, though with eight ports available this isn't something you're likely to be doing too often. A single USB 3 port sits off to the side, next to the power connector and its attendant on/off switch. The vertical nature of the USB port is a good decision, as it removes any limits that might have been placed on the size of flash drive you connect to it for sharing if it had been horizontal.

But Wi-Fi speed is what you're looking for in a Wi-Fi 7 router, and the Asus RT-BE88U offers enough, even without the 6GHz band. We set it up for testing by separating out the bands (smushing them into one that automatically negotiates the best connection is also possible) and testing throughput at close range, and again when a bit of distance and some inconvenient bits of a house were put between the two points. Here are the results:

That's not bad, and it's certainly fast enough for streaming and gaming, though it isn't as good as the top Wi-Fi 7 routers such as the Eero Max 7 or Netgear RS700S which can top 700Mbps up close.

Setting up the router is a case of installing the Asus Router app on your phone, then scanning a QR code on the base of the device to join its Wi-Fi network. From there, you can auto-detect your internet settings if you've got it plugged in directly, or choose DHCP mode from the advanced settings to set it up as an access point. 

For advanced settings you can log into the router's web interface, which looks the same as it has with every Asus router going back years. From here you can split out the 5GHz and 2.4GHz networks if you need to, tweak security, and add parental controls and other filtering.

The router is compatible with Asus' AI Mesh system that will allow you to chain routers together to cover a larger area, so being able to set it up in this way is welcome. There's also a dedicated SSID for IoT devices, which means your lightbulbs won't clutter up the network you're trying to game over with their constant chatter, and a guest network too for when your cousins come to stay and you don't trust them with the password.

The Asus RT-BE88U is, it must be pointed out, almost half the price of some other Wi-Fi 7 routers, so it's possible to overlook the slightly lower transfer speed and lack of a 6GHz network in favour of saving a few notes. The RT-BE88U also comes with the benefit that setup is easy, and the presence of Wi-Fi 7 means you pick up an element of future-proofing. With all those Ethernet ports, this router could sit at the heart of your home network for a very long time.

Wi-Fi 7 has its benefits, sure, but at $600 per unit, which each covering over 200m², you still need to be absolutely sure the impressive Amazon Eero Max 7 is the router for you. It's a mesh system, too, so chances are you'll want two or three to dot around your country estate, and the cost soon mounts up. Add to that the monthly fee for the sort of multi-gig fibre connection you'll want to make the most of all this wireless wonder, and networking can suddenly be as expensive as any other part of PC gaming.

Mesh systems work by having more than one router, or node, scattered around your property. They all broadcast the same SSIDs, and communicate with one another over Ethernet, if your house is wired for it, or using a high-capacity wireless network separate from the usual ones you'll use for streaming and that Wi-Fi kettle you bought on a whim. That can certainly be more convenient as long as you get a good connection. Placing mesh nodes, however, especially if you're trying to eliminate Wi-Fi dead spots caused by quirks of architecture or distance, is an artform in itself.

The thing about the Eero Max 7, though, is that one is probably enough. There's definitely a case for mesh if you're connecting an office environment, a house split over multiple floors, a thick-walled basement or a farm, but Wi-Fi 7 itself, with its extra speed and ability to cut through interference, is pretty good on its own. That said, though, put it in a mesh system and you've pretty much got something that can make itself heard anywhere.

The Eero Max 7 node comes as a smooth and shiny white rectangle that wouldn't be out of place as an Ikea wall light or Apple product from the time of the Anglepoise iMac. The Eero logo is picked out in silver, with a single coloured LED to tell you the router's status, and it's a minimal, classy design you won't mind having on display.

There are no visible antennas or multiple blinking lights, it just sits there being completely silent and unobtrusive—which is what you want if you're planning on dotting a few of them around your enormous property. It is kind of large though, which is something Wi-Fi 7 routers all seem to have in common. If space is a concern Eero has much smaller Wi-Fi 6 mesh nodes available.

The back is more interesting, although there's still a lot of smooth white plastic on show with cooling vents at the top and bottom. It's where the Ethernet ports are and Ethernet ports are interesting, dammit, especially when they're as fast as these. Eero has gone for some definite future-proofing here (though with Wi-Fi 7 we wonder how many cables these sockets will actually see, beyond the one that hooks up to the internet in home use) with a pair of 2.5Gb ports next to two more 10Gb connections. That's a lot of networkingness, and you'll need to make sure any cables and hubs you're using are rated for the same speeds to get the most out of it. 

But you don't buy a Wi-Fi 7 router just to use Ethernet cables, and the Wi-Fi options here are comprehensive. Setup is straightforward, but assumes you're tech savvy enough to find and download the phone app yourself—there's no printed guide in the box or QR code on the node itself. 

Once you've got it hooked up there aren't a lot of fine-grained controls on offer, which is generally fine as you can just leave it to get on with the job of running itself and transferring your data. The Max 7 comes with a trial subscription to the Eero Plus security package, which adds a VPN, MalwareBytes protection, content filters, ad blocking and enhanced support to the package. It costs $100 a year, though, and provides many things you could do yourself. Still, with the Eero's commitment to simplicity and its hands-off approach to router management, I can see it being popular.

Wireless speeds are, of course, promised to be spectacular. The Max 7 can theoretically handle up to 574 Mbps on the 2.4 GHz band, up to 8,677 Mbps on the 5 GHz band, and up to 11,529 Mbps on the 6 GHz band. That's a grand total of just over 20,000 Mbps if you take your shoes and socks off and add them all together. Though it's obviously something you'll never achieve in reality, it's still a lovely big number. 

This, of course, assumes perfect conditions and no inconvenient walls, but while even the 2.4GHz band, which is usually the longer-ranged of the trio thanks to the way it penetrates solid objects better, can outpace the average internet connection it doesn't offer the same (claimed) high speeds as the Netgear Nighthawk RS700S.

In our testing, which involves transferring a gig of data at varying distances over the Wi-Fi and working out the transfer rate using our fingers and toes, the Eero Max 7 put up a good fight, giving an average transfer rate over Wi-Fi 7 of around 570 Mbits/s whether it was in the same room or had a floor and a few walls in the way. This rate wandered, however, being as high as 624 Mbits in one test and as low as 499 Mbits in another. Its fastest rate was lower than that of the Netgear RS700S, but its slowest rate was better. It's the networking equivalent of a score draw.

Such is its commitment to simplicity that the Max 7 combines all its SSIDs into one, and doesn't allow you to separate them, relying on the devices to negotiate the best connection they can. There's a guest network, however, so you can hive some users off that way.

There's nothing else on the Max 7 beyond a USB-C power connection and a WPS button, but what is noticeable by its absence is the otherwise ubiquitous USB port, which allows you to set up simple file sharing through a flash drive (or USB hard drive for a multi-device backup solution), or share a USB printer, just by plugging it in. It's a feature that probably doesn't get a lot of use, especially as network storage and Wi-Fi printers are now commonplace, but having had USB ports on routers since the days before Wi-Fi 4, it seems wrong not to see one. 

Being an Amazon device—the well-known online grocer is Eero's parent company—there's plentiful IoT support in the Max 7. It will pair with your Echo and contains the necessary radios to control Zigbee and Matter devices, sidestepping the need for an extra hub. 

The question that arises with these high-speed, high-capacity routers, however, is just who are they for? These kinds of network speeds, especially over wired connections, are only really useful if you're transferring a lot of data to and from a server. Perhaps one day when we're all streaming 8K and have AI edge servers running our homes it'll be different, but a PC gamer wanting to share a sub-gigabit internet connection between their rig, phone, laptop and tablet is going to get the same sort of results from a much cheaper router, and might get a USB port too. 

With its speed, capacity, future-proofing and the ability to add extra nodes if your house suddenly gets bigger, the Eero Max 7 is one of the best Wi-Fi routers it's currently possible to buy, but you'll need to pay for the privilege.

Routers don't grab news headlines like CPUs, graphics cards, or gaming laptops do but they're pretty much standard hardware for every household with a PC in it. Most are discrete, dull-looking boxes that simply get on and do the job they were created for. Enter stage left Asus at Computex 2024, and its ROG Rapture GT-BE19000, the gaming version of its already ludicrous Wi-Fi 7 RT-BE96U router.

While we've not tested that particular router yet, our chums at Tom's Guide have and reckon it's a brilliant router, fast and packed with features, though the $700 price tag is perhaps as outrageous as it looks.

But if you feel a spikey, black router just isn't gamer enough for you, then don't worry as Asus clearly feels the same way. It's plastered the router with a variety of aesthetic enhancements to make it feel right at home in the ROG family of hardware, especially with the name Rapture GT-BE19000.

If you don't have GT in the name of something, it's automatically slow. Allegedly.

As far as we can tell, the components inside are no different to the original RT-BE96U, but you're getting some additional cooling (err, why?), some RGB (but of course), and a slightly bizarre collection of what appear to be decals, underneath a transparent plastic shield. 

Routers targeted at the gaming market have always been a tad on the extreme side when it comes to looks, but I have to say that I've not seen one quite so lairy as this one.

And you know what? I kind of want one! With two Wi-Fi 7 capable PCs in my house, it would be nice to take full advantage of that with an appropriate router, though my current Wi-Fi 6 one pretty much hits the maximum transfer rate of my ISP connection (500 Mbps) anyway.

The two 10Gb LAN ports would be great for hooking up all the other test PCs I have in my office or attaching a NAS to the network, although I'm not a fan of having Ethernet cables trailing about everywhere.

Truthfully though, I just want it for the Thargoid-inspired looks. Forget discrete and boring—give me something that looks like it could beam data directly into my frontal lobes. However, given that I can't afford the 'standard' RT-BE96U, I suspect I'll have no chance with the ROG Rapture GT-BE19000, whatever its retail price ends up coming to.

Then again, given how well Asus has been handling its warranty situation, perhaps it's a good job that I can't actually buy one. Ah well, my alien-router dreams will have to wait a while longer.

You can almost hear Also Sprach Zarathustra playing as you unbox the latest Nighthawk. It may be named after Lockheed's stealthy ground attack plane, but in the flesh it's all 2001's black monolith.

And just like Clark's creation the Netgear Nighthawk RS700S is here to uplift you. It brings with it unheard of technologies that will become the centre of your home for years to come. It shows us the way of the future and... calm down Ian, it's only a router.

The funny thing about Wi-Fi 7 kit, though, is just how advanced it seems over the Wi-Fi 5 and 6 gear we're all using (hint: not that much). Every new generation of wireless internettyness brings some innovations, but we're reaching the point of diminishing returns. With average UK and US homes being in the 1,000 to 2,000 sq ft range, why do you need a system that will cover 3,000 sq ft unless you live in a castle or want to share with your neighbours? 

Obviously there are good reasons for wanting more coverage, such as the ability to email while gardening and wanting decent signal strength away from the site of the router and through walls. You could buy a Wi-Fi 6 mesh system for the same price as the RS700S, but you'd miss out on the Wi-Fi 7 features and the admiring glances from your network-savvy friends. 

This latest release of the Wi-Fi standard, AKA IEEE 802.11be, offers twice the speed of v6 and is better at handling network congestion and keeping latency down. It offers a 6 GHz network with a blistering throughput of 11 Gbps, though distance and inconvenient walls will cut this down. What's perhaps more interesting is the 2.4 GHz channel, which offers 1.4 Gbps and has a much longer range, thanks to the ability of the lower frequencies to penetrate solid objects.

To take advantage of all this you'll need every device in the chain to be Wi-Fi 7 compliant, which means the right kind of extender, if you're using one, and a device like one of the latest Apple or Samsung Galaxy phones, HP, Lenovo, MSI laptops and desktop motherboards from Gigabyte and Asus, to mention just a few. Like all new wireless standards, Wi-Fi 7 is totally backward compatible, so for now a Wi-Fi 7 router is a hub to build around, with room for more devices in future as you upgrade and your needs grow.

The RS700S is a router you won't mind so much having on display. It's refined, a simple, shapely black tower with all the plugs squared away at the back. There are some vents, a few lights, but nothing that's going to prevent its positioning in a communal area of the house. All eight of its antennas are internal, so late-night trips to the fridge are unlikely to be disturbed by thoughts of Gregor Samsa, and there's a convenient button right on the front to turn off all the LEDs except the power light.

Around the back, there's an impressive array of Ethernet ports. The input is a 10-gig one, and this is what I mean about future-proofing. One glorious day, when all our homes have multi-gigabit fibre connections and we think nothing of quickly downloading a 500 GB game from Steam 2 onto a 500 TB SSD, then this router will still be a viable choice. There's a 10-gig output port too, which could be used to feed a hub in a complex network or a single data-hungry PC or server, along with four of the more common gigabit variety. 

Setting up the RS700S is straightforward, with both basic web browser and QR-code-assisted smartphone app setup available. If you want to get deep into the settings, then the web page is the way to go, as it has access to more options than the app. If it's just parental controls and speed monitoring you want (plus administration of Netgear Armor security, for which there's a one-year trial included), the app is fine, but for those times only the Advanced tab will do, you'll need to dial in using a browser.

In my iPerf3 testing, however, which transfers a gigabyte of data over the wireless link and basically sees how fast it goes, the RS700S proved truculent. It's unwilling to offer up its Wi-Fi 7 goodies unless you use Smart Connect, which aggregates the three wireless networks into one and negotiates the best connection. Turn this off, and the laptop and smartphone I tried could only connect using Wi-Fi 6 at best, even on the 6 GHz network. 

Still, with Smart Connect and Wi-Fi 7 enabled it transferred the data at a handy 704 Mbps with the client device close to the router (the laptop showed a link speed of as much as 3843 Mbps), and 204 Mbps when I put some distance, a floor, and some walls between the pair. Even on the long distance test it's comfortably faster than the Wi-Fi 6E Acer Predator Connect W6, and not that far off being twice as fast near the router itself.

It's basically impossible to trip up in general use, however, capable of serving 4K video streams (and 8K in the future), downloading from Steam at the full speed allowed by your internet connection, and transferring hundreds of files onto a network drive all at the same time to up to 200 devices. Like all Wi-Fi routers the speeds drop as you move further away, which is why you should run 50 feet of Cat7 Ethernet cable up your stairs, but this is an immensely powerful networking hub, and has the potential to remain that way for many years to come. 

The upside-down insect look is a popular one among Wi-Fi router manufacturers, who seem to assume that they're something you're going to keep behind the couch or in a cupboard rather than attempt to balance on a narrow shelf near the point at which the internet cabling enters your home.

The aggressive styling can make these devices look incongruous among the other tasteful artefacts you've gathered from trips to Ikea and Habitat, though the use of words such as 'Predator' and 'Killer' don't help either. The names of PC hardware components have been the butt of multiple jokes, but networking equipment has to be some of the most boring kit to receive the kind of title you might expect from an Air Force drone.

Still, they're necessary if we insist on living in the early 21st century, streaming, downloading and otherwise internetting it up. And if you've got a fast fibre connection and the need to transfer data quickly, these so-called 'gaming routers' have a lot to offer. 

Acer's Predator Connect W6 is a Wi-Fi 6E router with the requisite number of little leg pointed into the air (though it can also be wall-mounted, in which case the legs splay out further, giving it the appearance of a large bug that's just hit the paintwork at high speed). There are vents carved into the plastic body (the quad-core CPU is passively cooled), with some LEDs in the shape of the Predator logo buried underneath (these are quite bright, but can be turned off), and a row of five Ethernet ports at the back. 

It's all very standard, though the design of the router means it takes up even more space than you'd expect from something that's basically square, as by having the power input and USB port on one side, and the Ethernet ports on another at 90° to that, you're forced to put it in a diamond configuration to keep the cables at the back.

One of those Ethernet ports is the input, and can take up to 2.5 Gbps of internets. This is, to use a technical term, a lot, and you'll be distributing it through four gigabit ports (one of which is a mysterious 'Game' port that claims to prioritise gaming traffic and is the one you'll want to plug your gaming desktop into) plus the Wi-Fi, which has a maximum throughput of 7.8 Gbps. That's a figure arrived at by manufacturers adding together the transfer rates of the router's three bands, rather than being rooted (or routed?) in reality. 

As long as you have Wi-Fi 6E equipment to talk to it (plain old Wi-Fi 5 and 6 still do fine, but you'll lose out on the fancy 6GHz band, which can be handy for avoiding congestion) those theoretical speeds are yours to do with what you will. As you'll no doubt have noticed, this is way higher than any possible input, and outstrips average broadband speeds in the UK and US by 111 and 40 times respectively, but means the router won't be a bottleneck if you're transferring data between devices, gaming and streaming at the same time.

Happily, setup is a breeze. The wireless network is available straight away, and there's a QR code on the bottom of the router's casing to help you get connected via your web browser. From here, it's just a case of entering your WAN details, giving the Wi-Fi channels amusing SSIDs and changing the password. There's a phone app that you can use for all this too, which will step you through the setup in a more beginner-friendly way.

Once it's connected, there's a whole range of features to, er, play with. Networking isn't particularly sexy but it is essential for modern life, especially if you're a PC games enjoyer, so being able to easily slip into the admin panel and change a setting is paramount. That said, there's often little need these days, as routers have become very good at doing things automatically. 

To accompany the 'Game' port on the back, the Predator W6 offers QoS features ('compatible with Intel Killer Prioritization Engine,' so Acer crows) to prioritise your gaming traffic. It also includes a preset dedicated to GeForce Now which will appeal to, well, at least some people.

Otherwise, hooking up to a fibre connection (600Mbps in my case: not great, not terrible) by both Ethernet and Wi-Fi 6 leads to a stable connection and good throughput. Routers have been able to handle multiple connections and complicated network topography for some time now, so the fact it breezes through serving multiple streaming, gaming, and IoT uses simultaneously isn't anything unusual. 

What routers are really sold on are their big numbers and their price. At £300/$300 there are cheaper Wi-Fi 6E models available, though few with as impressive a combined throughput figure (Netgear's RAXE300 hits the same combined speed, but its RRP is higher). If you want to upgrade from the router your ISP gave you, then the Predator W6 will probably make a big difference to a congested network with a lot of users.

But the way it's designed means that it wants a lot more attention than most of us are willing to give networking hardware within our homes. It may have Quality of Service features, but its quality of life layout is something that stops it from being an easy recommendation.

Intel has unveiled its Thunderbolt Share technology, which utilizes the bandwidth on offer from Thunderbolt 4 and 5 ports to share and sync data, and control two PCs with one keyboard and mouse. 

It's not the first way to link two PCs. I've used crossover cables in years past, and I recall using a USB link device about a decade back, but this method looks like it will be the easiest way yet to link two PCs together. It's not quite a plug and play solution though, as it will need a software app to work.

At its most basic, Thunderbolt Share is a great way to share data between two computers that would eliminate the need to use flash drives or external hard drives to transfer data. It supports drag and drop functionality, and automatic folder sync. I really like the idea of using this to transfer Steam backups between benchmarking systems!

Beyond data sharing, Thunderbolt Share supports remote access, so you can control a second PC using one monitor, keyboard and mouse. It supports screen sharing at up to 1080p at 60fps. Support for 1440p or 4K would be nice, but that's something that could come in the future.

Thunderbolt Share can be licensed with Thunderbolt accessories. Docks would be the most logical example, while things like monitors with multiple Thunderbolt ports could use it too. As it's an Intel technology, and separate from USB4, AMD owners appear to be out of luck, at least for now.

Intel emphasizes the security aspects of Thunderbolt Share. It supports VT-d and Windows User Access Control. And, sharing data over a cable is inherently more secure than using WiFi, a wide area network or the cloud. 

Apart from a couple of tests with external GPUs in years past, I have never used a Thunderbolt device on any of my home systems. I quite like how this sounds, and this might be the first time I consider using Thunderbolt on a day-to-day basis. We'll have to wait and see just how the app performs in practice before giving it the thumbs up though.

Intel says Thunderbolt Share will be offered on select PCs and accessories starting in the second half of 2024. Lenovo, Acer, MSI, Razer, Kensington, Belkin, Promise, Plugable, OWC and others are on board, with more announcements to come.

A recent Windows security update is causing some VPN connections to fail, Microsoft has said. The company is working on a resolution.

The KB5036893 update, known as the April security update, was first released on April 9, 2024. Since then, and after rolling out across heaps of PCs, Microsoft has noticed the inadvertent effect the update is having on virtual private networks. It's causing some of them to fail to connect entirely, thus potentially leaving users without a way to hide their IP address or change their location on the web.

We don't have much more information about the fault beyond what Microsoft is reporting on its Windows 11 issues page:

"Windows devices might face VPN connection failures after installing the April 2024 security update (KB5036893) or the April 2024 non-security preview update," Microsoft says.

"Next steps: We are working on a resolution and will provide an update in an upcoming release."

The issue affects Windows 11 (versions 23H2, 22H2, and 21H2) and Windows 10 (versions 22H2 and 21H2).

Looking to the Windows 11 subreddit, which usually is quick to pick up common faults in the OS, I don't see many reports of the issue. Then again, it's one of those issues that you might not attribute to Windows unless you know Microsoft has admitted blame. If you're struggling to get connected, anyways, it sounds like you need to try to remove this package. Microsoft offers the following advice on how to do that:

"To remove the LCU after installing the combined SSU and LCU package, use the DISM/Remove-Package command line option with the LCU package name as the argument. You can find the package name by using this command: DISM /online /get-packages.

"Running Windows Update Standalone Installer (wusa.exe) with the /uninstall switch on the combined package will not work because the combined package contains the SSU. You cannot remove the SSU from the system after installation."

Another alternative is to find out if your router and VPN provider support running a VPN directly through the hub, meaning you don't need Windows to be aware of the connection at all. That's a slightly extreme measure for some, but if needs must.

There aren't many stories in the world of technology that could easily make it as a plot for a tense spy-thriller movie, but this one sure has all the right hallmarks for one. Last month, the US Justice Department carried out an authorised operation in which it neutralised a botnet, comprising hundreds of routers in homes and offices, that was used to carry out spearphishing and other credentials stealing. And it was achieved by using the very same malware as that by the botnet itself.

As reported by Ars Technica, the network was created by the officially titled GRU Military Unit 26165 (also known by the names Forest Blizzard, Fancy Bear, Sednit, and others), a state-sponsored hacking group that reported has direct ties to the Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation (GRU, for short).

But rather than using its own malware, or anything developed by the GRU, the group used a piece of malware called Moobot that's been used before to insecure routers. In this instance, it infected the operating system on certain Ubiquiti Edge routers that were still using the default, publicly-known admin passwords

Once up and running, the group could then use the network to scrape all kinds of information passing through the routers. While the number of infected routers was relatively small, around a thousand or so, it was more than enough to create an effective botnet that was invasive enough to warrant direct intervention by the FBI and DoJ.

To counter it, the DoJ cleverly used the same malware to hack back into the routers, copy and delete any stolen data, as well as remove the malicious scripts, and alter the routers’ firewalls to prevent any further remote management of them. To coin a simple phrase, it hacked the hack.

As one can't always rely on the authorities to prevent one's router from being used for criminal activities, there are simple steps that anyone running a small business or office from home can follow.

Start by resetting the router back to its factory default settings (which will clear anything stored on it), then update it to the latest firmware version, followed by changing all of the default usernames and passwords, and then finally use its firewall to block any remote management access.

It can be quite hard to tell if your router is infected with malware or not, but the above actions will certainly help to nip that in the bud. What are you waiting for?

Wi-Fi signal strength has always been a temperamental beast. One minute it's a full five bars, yet merely taking a short walk into a different room can cause it to fall to a miserable one bar of stuttering frustration. However, devices using the new "HaLow" 802.11ah standard have just been demonstrated working at an astonishing 1.8 mile range, and next to a busy, interference-filled urban area no less.

Morse Micro, a wireless technology company that's been experimenting with the new standard, has released a video of its latest demonstration showing that a usable wireless signal can be achieved at a gigantic 1.8 mile range (via Tom's Hardware). While the test was performed along a large empty beach in San Francisco, the beachfront itself is packed with signal-interfering buildings, making it a good demonstration of the techs ability to maintain a workable connection amidst the hubbub of competing signal noise in the area.

To test out the connection speeds the team carried out a video call at various distance intervals, measuring the average speed as they went. While the connection speed dropped significantly at longer distances, it still managed a 1Mbps connection at the 1.8 mile (3 kilometre) marker, which was just enough to hold on to a crunchy but just-about-usable live video connection.

The long range 900MHz Wi-Fi HaLow standard was first approved by the Wi-Fi Alliance back in 2016, and was designed for use in smart homes, industrial centres and smart city environments.

Along with increasing the usable range, the standard also hopes to lower the power consumption of long range wireless devices, with increased signal penetration to hopefully allow a more reliable signal when obstructed by walls or nearby objects.

While this demonstration works as a great proof of concept of the technology, there are some limitations when it comes to speed. The announced data rates of the standard were between 150 kbps and 78 Mbps, so it's unlikely that you'd want to use it for an average home connection even at the top end of these potential speeds, at least for anything more than light usage.

For home use the Wi-Fi 7 standard looks to be taking the lead, with faster maximum speeds, better handling of multiple device connections and 6GHz band connections, along with a wider 320MHz channel width. The new standard is also designed to lower latency on congested networks, making it more practical for an average modern home and all its many internet connected devices.

Still, I would like to see what the HaLow devices would make of a personal bane of my life, my current kitchen door, which seems capable of blocking every wireless signal I've tried to date. 

Come the apocalypse I plan to shelter behind it, as at this point it seems like it's made from a material hitherto unknown to science. Save me, HaLow devices. You may be my only hope.

After a long period of development, the Wi-Fi Alliance has officially begun certifying Wi-Fi 7 devices. This paves the way for mass adoption of the new standard, providing more seamless interoperability. Until the next standard comes along, we can expect Wi-Fi networking to dramatically improve, with faster, more reliable connections and reduced latency. The latter is something gamers will appreciate.

Wi-Fi 7 is theoretically capable of delivering aggregated throughput of over 40 Gbit/s, even if speeds don't come anywhere close to that limit. That's fast enough to supplant consumer-level wired Ethernet. But speeds are just one of many benefits offered by Wi-Fi 7. It's been designed to better handle multiple simultaneous connections, or maximize performance with a single connection. A key feature is MLO, or Multi-Link Operation, which dynamically assigns different channels and frequencies to deliver better performance with lower latency and less interference.

Connections in the 6GHz band are now possible, which, along with a wider 320MHz channel width, will allow multiple devices to access speeds in the multi-Gigabit range. Households with many devices including PCs, phones and laptops can use Wi-Fi 7 to do things like stream 4K video and deliver untethered AR and VR services.

But Wi-Fi 7 isn’t just about raw speed and multiple-device support. Lower latency is something that gamers can take advantage of. Anyone that’s been frustrated by poor performing, crowded or congested networks should be happy with what Wi-Fi 7 has to offer. One of the less highlighted features of Wi-Fi 7 is 512 Compressed block-ack, which lowers overhead and improves efficiency. Additionally, Triggered Uplink Access improves performance in latency sensitive applications.

Pre-certified Wi-Fi 7 devices have been available for a while now. It was a highly touted feature on many Z790 refresh motherboards, while several manufacturers have already released Wi-Fi 7 ready routers. As long as you check periodically for firmware and software updates, these devices should work seamlessly with certified Wi-Fi 7 devices.

Don't feel as though you need to rush out an upgrade to Wi-Fi 7 though. It'll be with us for many years to come. Even now Wi-Fi 6E routers carry a price premium, especially the high bandwidth ones, and high end Wi-Fi 7 routers will remain expensive for the foreseeable future. At least you get back compatibility, so your older Wi-Fi devices will still function, albeit without Wi-Fi 7 exclusive features.

Man, Asus makes a lot of routers. This one, built of charcoal-coloured plastic Batman might consider too aggressively angular, is a dual-band Wi-Fi 6 job with four Ethernet ports, four antennas, and a single USB port.

Compared with some, that's an uninspiring number of appendages, but it really is all you need for a satisfying network experience if you're just trying to share a broadband hookup between a gaming PC, a smart TV, and everybody's phone. Asus also makes a point of the AX4200's open NAT and ease of port forwarding, which will make stable online gaming connections easier.

From the outside, it's not a bad looking unit. From the wedge-shaped school of design, with its four antennas standing straight from the back edge, it's reasonably small, is light, and has wall-mounting slots on the back. It's not completely covered in flashing lights either, so it's going to work in a bedroom where you don't want to wake up in the morning with logos emblazoned on your eyeballs.

There's a degree of future-proofing in the form of a 2.5Gb WAN socket, for when connections that fast become commonplace, and if you use LAN integration on two of the Ethernet ports you'll be able to pipe almost all that bandwidth to a single device—or you could use the 3603mbps of the 5GHz Wi-Fi connection.

As this isn't a Wi-Fi 6E device there's no 6GHz band, and we'd recommend avoiding the 2.4GHz network, or keeping it for low-demand devices, as not only is it congested but on this router tops out at 574mbps. That's still quite a lot, but once you've got a few streaming sticks and phones connected you'll want your gaming PC to use the higher frequency band. There's beamforming onboard too, to maximise the internets in your general direction.

The antennas are permanently attached but still movable, and other than the orange flashed on their sides there's very little that stands out about the AX4200. It's the same sort of basic design we saw on the likes of the RT-N66U back in 2012, whose 450mbps of Wi-Fi 4 (or 802.11n as it was called back then) is greatly outstripped by the current generation.

Still, we're not complaining. A quick check of a well-known shopping site shows we paid £100 for the RT-N66U 11 years ago, so have received a 155% increase in Wi-Fi performance for a 40% increase in price.

It's a simple enough device to use—one thing that has changed since 2012 is how quick and convenient it is to set up a new router nowadays—and if you want make your home network more complicated you can use the AX4200 with Asus' AI Mesh to set up a network of repeaters to pipe memes all around the house. 

The single USB port, which is quite tightly positioned by one of the antennas, and may be an issue if you want to stick a thick USB flash drive in it, can be used to share storage as a media server, AIDisk, Time Machine, FTP or Samba, or to insert a 4G dongle as a backup connection in case the fibre goes down.

The on-board software, which all runs on a 2.0GHz quad-core CPU with a little bit of RAM and flash storage attached, is well featured. There's adaptive QoS, so you can keep your games machine first in the queue for the internets, a guest network, various bandwidth and traffic monitoring tools, parental controls, an intrusion prevention system and Asus' AIProtection suite which offers malicious site blocking, and can prevent known infected devices from connecting via the router. 

It all adds up to a well-rounded package for a decent price. The AX4200 may not break any records for connection speed, weight, or price, but it's the sort of thing that can upgrade an existing network to Wi-Fi 6 quickly and easily, or form the hub of a new one if you're setting up wireless gaming and streaming for the first time. 

Its ability to deal with 2.5Gbps of input gives it a degree of longevity—it'll be a long time before domestic internet connections reach that level—and if you want something easy to set up, with the important Wi-Fi 6 speeds and features, then this is certainly one for the shortlist.

Somebody killed a headcrab, flipped it upside down, hollowed it out, and replaced all that beaky nastiness with something 100 times worse: a Wi-Fi 6E router. The eight external antennas the Asus ROG Rapture GT-AXE16000 uses to saturate your house with internets really do look like the legs of an inverted biomechanical arachnid. It makes me wish I hadn't been blessed with the perfect face for radio, just so I could do an unboxing video of it.

Anyway. If you're really into routers (what's wrong with you?) then you may have already read the review of the TP-Link Archer AX6000 on this site, in which I mention that particular piece of internet infrastructure being quite large. It isn't. THIS is large. And at $600/£570, you'd expect it to be good too.

Asus' ridiculous ROG Rapture GT-AXE16000 router deserves to be kept somewhere you can see it, so you can bring tour parties through to ooh and aah at its sculptural form, though we pity whoever has to do the dusting. The antennae won't unscrew, but can be moved around in the hunt for a better signal. This isn't really necessary, but then the PC Gamer test house is modern and quite small, with thin walls, and it flooded the place with its waves.

There's a big shiny panel on top, so you can see up your own nose when you reach around the back to unplug a cable, along with some vents. It's translucent and lights up when the router is active, producing quite an aggressive pattern of logo-rich illumination, but happily it can be shut off. Then there are those legs: the mechanical spider at the end of Wild Wild West comes to mind, or possibly a Mass Effect Reaper, or something from one of Warhammer 40K's more industrial Necron dynasties. The temptation to install it upside down, put a pair of googly eyes on it, and give it a name is immense.

They go all the way round (and there are four more hidden inside) meaning the cables the thing needs to make it work have to snake in-between them. Luckily it's an uneven shape, and there's one cut-off corner for the power and USB connections to lurk for extra accessibility, while the Ethernet cables are split into two sections—the four gigabit ports, plus the WAN, are to the left of a leg, while the two 10GB ports are on the right.

Yeah, 10-gig ports. This router isn't taking any prisoners as a network hub. Your connection to the outside world comes via a 2.5Gb socket, so you can suck all the data out of a fast fibre connection without any of it getting lost (at the time of writing the fastest connection available in the PC Gamer test suburb is 1.3Gbps). The 10-giggers can be used for a backbone cable if you've got two points on your network that exchange a lot of data, or for attaching fast network storage, but they're probably overkill for today's home networks, especially as our broadband connections don't yet approach that level. You can aggregate two of the gigabit ports, too.

Wi-Fi performance is exceptional, with four bands at your disposal—2.4GHz, two lots of 5GHz, and the 6GHz for special 6E devices. Add all the speeds together and you get something not unadjacent to 16,000Mbps, hence the presence of that figure in the model number. It's a lot, and you'll need a great many devices all connected and working at once to take advantage of it all. It also fits in with Asus' AIMesh system of extenders, for those times you're gaming on a country estate.

Indeed, having that much available wireless bandwidth is going to out-do all but the fanciest home internet connections, which raises the question of who this router is for. Show-offs, certainly. 10-gig cable enthusiasts who like pinging 8K video files about, perhaps. Gamers? Well, maybe. 

Having bigger numbers has never done anybody any harm, except in the wallet area, and if high frame rates in the latest online shooter are important to you, you'll get the same result from something cheaper.

On a 600Mbps fibre connection and a 5GHz Wi-Fi hookup there was no slowdown until we'd moved far enough away from the router to push it down toward the 500 mark, but even then we were halfway down the garden. It's not this router that's going to bottleneck your system, but more likely the Wi-Fi chip in an older device or an attempt to use it from a long way down the street.

Router setup in general has improved markedly in the past few years, with a degree of standardisation even creeping in, and the ROG Rapture really does make it easy. Under the router's immense body (we do not mean to fat shame, but it really is very impressively large) you'll find a QR code, a scan of which with the Asus app prompts you to set a network name and password. Then you're good to go, entering your broadband account details is the last bit of the puzzle, before all the fiddling begins.

There's some good software on board the ROG Rapture, including robust parental controls and the popular Trend Micro anti-malware and QoS package, plus a firewall, guest network, the ability to connect drives and printers for sharing, and Samba, media server and Time Machine compatibility too. It all runs on a 2GHz quad-core CPU with 2GB of DDR4 and 256GB of storage, making it almost a PC in its own right.

Honestly, though, you don't need this router. But you might want it. This incarnation of the ROG Rapture is large and expensive, but there's no denying it's fast and capable. 

It's hard to think of situations in which it might be the best choice—perhaps a shared house with three gaming laptops fighting it out with a plethora of tablets all streaming 4K movies from a fast fibre connection, or the home of a server fanatic determined to pipe data around as fast as possible. If you do end up with one, you'll be able to feel smug about your ability to make the most of a fibre-optic internet connection, and that feeling might be worth the expense.

With the increasing proliferation of fibre broadband connections, a router that can keep up, feeding the fastest possible connection to the multitude of wired and wireless devices we keep in our homes, like peculiar pets, is a must. TP-Link's AX6000 offers Wi-Fi 6 speeds (but not 6E) and a mammoth eight Ethernet sockets, making it perfect for those with complex networking needs.

It's the sort of shape that wouldn't be out of place in some shaky footage of an alien spaceship hovering over rural Iowa doing unspeakable things to cows, and the foldy-up Wi-Fi antennas that sit on the perimeter just add to that impression. 

It's also reminiscent of the first-gen Xbox from 2001, the slotted top panel that allows heat to rise from the frantically working innards diagonally broken by a shiny, raised X with a smashing orangey shiny bit in the middle. It's a bit smaller though, that Xbox was chunky—this router is about the size of a hardback book, or a pizza box for someone who lacks digestive ambition.

I'm not sure anyone buys a router for the way it looks, they're more likely to be tucked away out of sight somewhere with easy access to Ethernet cables, but at 26cm (10-inch) square you're going to need to find an area of flat surface for the Archer to sit on. That's if you don't choose to wall mount it—there are holes underneath to facilitate this, and with the stubby antennas rotated 90 degrees, you might be able to use it as a coat rack. Though we wouldn't recommend it.

This extra size makes room for the eight gigabit Ethernet ports at the back of the router, making this a good choice if you've got a complicated wired network or an aversion to hubs. Two of them can be aggregated for a 2-gig connection too, if you've got something that can benefit from that sort of thing. The top row of Ethernet ports, however, require the cables to be inserted with the release catch at the top, where it comes perilously close to the overhanging edge of the router casing. This makes it hard to insert the requisite finger to get the cable out again if you ever need to. 

It's probably not a problem that's going to come up too often, but if you suddenly decide to completely change your network topology (or move house) it's going to be annoying.

And instead of a constellation of blinking LED lights on top, the Archer has only one. It starts off red before turning to blue if everything's working, and you can turn it off altogether, checking in on the router status in its web interface or the TP-Link Tether mobile app.

The WAN port on the Archer is capable of 2.5Gbps of internets, which will outstrip most domestic connections. It offers a dual-band Wi-Fi network, with 5GHz and 2.4GHz operating using WI-Fi 6 but not 6E, so no frolics into the 6GHz part of the spectrum here. 

TP-Link claims you'll get up to 1148 Mbps for the 2.4GHz network, and 4804 Mbps when connected to the 5GHz option. With these figures, the words 'up to' are often doing quite a lot of work, and you'll have to add them together and do some rounding to get to the 6000 in the model number. 

We connected the router to a 600Mbps internet wire, hooked up a Wi-Fi 6 device on 5GHz, and got... 600Mbps. This should come as no surprise, and is really the least we should expect from Wi-Fi 6. Ping over Wi-Fi was no different to that of a wired connection, it coped with 4K and HD streaming to as many devices as we could muster, and it all shows that this router isn't going to be the bottleneck on your network, even if you're sharing it—it's your broadband connection itself that will max out first unless you're on some futuristic multi-gigabit line. 

In which case, hello, do you have a flying car, too?

Elsewhere on the router, you get a pair of USB 3 ports: one Type A and the other Type C. This is overkill for sharing a printer but does mean you can potentially share a USB SSD on your network for a cut-price file server. Most common file systems are supported (though not EXT4, Linux fans) and the router can run an FTP server, media server and Apple Time Machine, as well as using Samba for sharing.

Wi-Fi 6 features—particularly OFDMA, which allows multiple devices to share carrier bands—are good for wireless availability if you've got a lot of devices in the house, while a quad-core CPU backed up by a pair of co-processors keeps things flowing along nicely.

Setting up the router is easy. The antennae are stubby and permanently attached, so you just need to pivot them into their upright position rather than having to screw them in. This means there's not much in the way of wiggling the aerials to be done, trying to find their optimum position. You'll then need to find somewhere with enough space to put it and still attach the necessary cables. 

Once it's installed, you'll need to configure it using the web interface or app just like any other router. There are plenty of options on offer, including a QoS setting for gaming and device prioritisation so you can make sure your gaming PC gets first bite of the bandwidth cherry. There's also a traffic monitor that gets quite granular, making it easy to spot who's using up all the data allowance late at night.

The interface is easy to use, some feat in a sector that's notorious for baffling UI design, and manages to reduce the pain of router setup and tweaking. 

A built-in anti-malware system from Trend Micro offers parental controls as well as QoS (with both broad presets such as 'gaming' or 'streaming' and individual device settings, so you can prioritise your gaming PC over an iPad streaming your soap opera of choice) and a degree of antivirus too.

TP-Link's Archer AX6000 was the company's first Wi-Fi 6 router, which means you won't get the benefit of the more modern Wi-Fi 6E tech. However, this is likely to be of little concern to anyone but those who simply must have the latest and greatest. Wi-Fi 6 itself is enough of a step forward for gaming, the additional features such as beamforming providing a strong signal. 

Connect this router to a fast broadband connection, and it has enough speed and capability to keep a whole household of streamers happy. 

However, with a pre-discount price of £350, it's undercut by routers offering flashier specs, including some from TP-Link itself, despite being cheaper than some flagship offerings. It's mature enough now, though, that original price is more or less a thing of the past. 

The ability to connect to so many devices at once, wired and wireless, is a good thing to have, but if just a few super-high-speed wireless connections to recent devices are what you need, there might be better choices out there.

TechPowerUp reports that the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers has certified 802.11bb as a standard for "light-based wireless communications," known as "Li-Fi." This certification "provides a globally recognised framework for deployment of LiFi technology," say Li-Fi tech companies pureLiFi and Fraunhofer HHI.

Li-Fi, which was introduced in 2011, is short for "Light Fidelity." It literally uses visible, infrared, or ultraviolet light instead of radio frequencies for high-speed data transmission. Li-Fi uses special LED light bulbs installed in houses and offices as routers.

Since light travels much faster than Wi-Fi radio waves, data speeds are significantly faster. How much faster? Speeds up to a ridiculous 224GB/s are promised by Li-Fi companies or "the equivalent of downloading 18 HD movies every second." According to the LiFi site, the speeds are "due to the fact that the visible light spectrum is 1,000 times larger than the RF spectrum, which is only about 300 GHz."

According to one of the biggest Li-Fi companies, Fraunhofer, Li-Fi can benefit AR/VR and gaming with "very low latencies." The more practical applications for Li-Fi would be for businesses, schools, hospitals, or any other organization that requires fast, reliable, and, most importantly, secure wireless internet. 

Light can't penetrate walls like radio waves, which is both a downside and an advantage for Li-Fi. It means you need a Li-Fi-equipped LED bulb in the room you want to use it in, but Fraunhofer says this will "reduce jamming and eavesdropping risks" since the data transmission range is limited to the coverage area of the light, making it difficult to hijack the signal without being physically present in the same room.

Lots of other questions are answered by Li-Fi companies on the official site for the standard. As to whether sunlight will interfere, they say that "modulated light is still detectable even under overly bright conditions, such as daylight." And if you want to use Li-Fi in a dark room, well, you can't quite do that, but it apparently works at under 10% room illumination. Somewhat surprising is that your device doesn't need line of sight with the Li-Fi bulb, as it can "pick up signals from light bouncing off of other surfaces," although the signals may be degraded. We'll be curious to test it for ourselves.

Allistair Banham, the CEO of pureLiFi, considers Li-Fi a "complementary and additive solution to [radio frequency] communications." The adoption of 802.11bb could mean we'll start seeing consumer Li-Fi products in the near future, as Fraunhofer says the standard addresses "mass-market requirements" for Li-Fi products

Now that the new standard is out there, companies in earnest can start rolling out Li-Fi devices like pureLifi's Light Antenna One. The company bills the tiny device as a quicker and safer alternative to Wi-Fi for secure tasks that require eating enormous amounts of bandwidth and says it's nearly ready for mass production. We have no sense yet as to how much it is going to cost.

The White House today rolled out a plan outlining a road to universal high-speed internet access in the United States by 2030. The plan will draw on some $42 billion in funding from the $1 trillion 2021 infrastructure laws that Biden championed.

"It's the biggest investment in high-speed internet ever. Because for today's economy to work for everyone, internet access is just as important as electricity, or water, or other basic services," said President Joe Biden at the White House on Monday.

The plan will be based on a Federal Communications Commission map, recently released, that highlights major gaps in access. Presumably it will also be based on the new broadband standard in the US of 100Mbps downstream, 20Mbps up.

News agency Reuters reports that the plan will most funding will hit larger states like Texas and California, as well as those with large underserved rural populations, like Virginia, Alabama, and Louisiana. It also includes money for US territories, like the Virgin Islands. Rural populations in these areas are forced to rely on slow, unreliable satellite internet connections. (I'd know—I live in one and would be forced to use it, but for the grace of a lucky nearby fiber internet trunk.)

An accompanying statement by Vice President Kamala Harris said that "24 million people in our country do not have access to high-speed internet, either because they cannot afford the monthly cost of a plan or because they live in communities that have not yet been fully connected to fiber-optic networks. Every person in our nation, no matter where they live, should be able to access and afford high-speed internet."

High-speed internet access has long been a problem in the rural United States due to its remarkably low population density. Despite being either the third or fourth largest country by land area, it ranks 186th on a list of countries by population density. The early COVID pandemic shutdowns raised this issue en masse, as students in poorer more rural counties were unable to effectively access online course materials or attend virtual classes.

I'll get back to you in 2030 about whether they succeed on this one.

Thick Ethernet is not what I expected the progenitor of modern-day networking to be named, but alas, it is. This form of Ethernet, 10BASE5, also called thicknet, and IEEE 802.3 standard if you're boring, was the first commercially available standardised implementation back in 1983, and got its name for its uses of "thick and stiff" coaxial cable.

Slightly eccentric computing history that I, a child of the early '90s, had no clue about until just now. 

Better yet, this thicknet used an immensely satisfying method of attaching devices to a network. Rather than plumb in your average RJ45 connector, with thicknet the easiest way to connect a new device to a network was by puncturing the outer cable shielding and probing into the electrically conductive cabling within. This was known as a vampire tap. 

Vampire taps actually were created to save a lot of hassle with cutting a cable on both ends and wiring new connectors every time a new device was added.

I came across this iconic information while scrolling TikTok, as us sort of young(ish) but actually 30-year-old folk like to do, where a video from davidbombal showcases the actual vampire tapping process through actual physical examples. In the video, you can see the actual connector used to puncture the cable and keep a firm 'bite' onto it. It's a great video, and a look into the surprisingly brutal beginnings of Ethernet as we know it today. 

Admittedly, it looks just a little more fiddly than plugging in an RJ45 connector on both ends.

How I've made it this far without running into potentially the two epicly-named things in computing history, I don't know. And doesn't this just make you think today's networking cables aren't anywhere near thick, or vampiric, enough. 

Thick Ethernet, or thicknet, was replaced later on in the '80s by thinnet. Thinnet, otherwise known as 10BASE2, cheapernet, or thin Ethernet if you're boring was the dominant standard for up to 10 Mbps connections (that's what the 10 stands for in 10BASE2) up until the early '90s. One reason for this was because its thinner cables were generally cheaper to buy and easier to fit.

After that came 10BASE-T, which used twisted pair cables instead of coaxial, and which is still used in the modern day. 10BASE-T became 100BASE-TX (the aptly named fast Ethernet—gotta love these matter-of-fact names). Then 1000BASE-T, and later 10GBASE-T. The latter increasing speeds all the way up to 10 Gbps, which pretty much brings us up into the modern-age.

Asus is recommending users update the firmware on some of its most popular routers in order to address critical security vulnerabilities. The updates include fixes or mitigations for nine security vulnerabilities. 

According to Bleeping Computer, the CVE-2022-26376 and CVE-2018-1160 vulnerabilities are the most worrisome. The first is a memory corruption vulnerability that could let attackers launch DoS attacks or even execute code. It carries a critical 9.8/10 severity rating according to the NIST's National Vulnerability Database.  

The second is a five-year-old vulnerability with the same 9.8/10 critical rating. It too can allow an attacker to execute code. Both methods place the router at risk of becoming part of a botnet or used for all kinds of nefarious purposes.

The list of affected models follows: GT6, GT-AXE16000, GT-AX11000 PRO, GT-AX6000, GT-AX11000, GS-AX5400, GS-AX3000, XT9, XT8, XT8 V2, RT-AX86U PRO, RT-AX86U, RT-AX86S, RT-AX82U, RT-AX58U, RT-AX3000, TUF-AX6000, and TUF-AX5400. 

Asus clearly believes these are significant issues. "Please note, if you choose not to install this new firmware version, we strongly recommend disabling services accessible from the WAN side to avoid potential unwanted intrusions. These services include remote access from WAN, port forwarding, DDNS, VPN server, DMZ, port trigger," Asus said on its Product Security Advisory webpage.

In other words, turn off your internet. Eek.

An unpatched router will be at risk of being turned into a botnet zombie, which can then be used to carry out a variety of scummy actions including Denial of Service attacks, password theft, or sending spam emails.

Asus routers have been targeted in the past. Last year its devices were vulnerable to the Cyclops Blink malware. Asus is not the only router manufacturer to have security issues, though. Pretty much every manufacturer faces them at some point. In 2020, the Fraunhofer Institute for Communication (FKIE) examined 127 home routers from several manufacturers, and all 127 had vulnerabilities.

Check for router updates regularly, folks! Its either that or ditch the internet altogether.

Did you know there are words just walking around out there waiting to blow up your day? Words that you thought you knew. Like wi-fi, for example. You thought you had a mutual understanding: you learned the definition of the word, how to spell and pronounce it, and in exchange you could go through life using it without studying the entire history of language. An innocent life! That's how I lived once. And then a portmanteau absolutely wrecked my shit.

A portmanteau, if you don't know, is the smooshing together of two words to make a new one. Like brunch. Or biopic. Or email. Obvious, right? Well—until today, I had no idea how many other words in tech are portmanteaus rather than strong, independent creations imbued with their own meaning. The one that truly sent me reeling was modem.

Deep breath. "Modem?" Fake word. It's just a modulator-demodulator. Of course it is. A modem's whole job is to modulate an analog signal into a digital one, and then demodulate it again on the other end.

How did I not know this? I'd chalk this up to an age thing, but I was using modems in my teens when dial-up was still relatively hot technology. I guess by then the portmanteau was so ingrained, nobody was going around explaining how modems were the brunch of the technology world.

Except, like, it turns out there are so many brunches of the technology world. There are portmanteaus everywhere. It's a mimosa minefield out there.

"Codec?" Not some cool word we plucked from the ether for communications and video formats. Just a coder-decoder.

"Bit?" A binary digit. Whoever came up with that one was really stretching it, honestly.

"Pixel?" Another portmanteau!! A pixel is a picture element.

Curveball—did you know Sega's name is a shortening of Service Games of Japan? This is perhaps the most shocking bit of useless games trivia I've learned since realizing the pun in Miles "Tails" Prower.

Learning all these portmanteaus makes me want to sit and stare off into space like TV's Pablo Escobar. They seem so obvious. How did I not know them? How do I go on using technology every day when it could betray me at any moment? 

I guess my only recourse is to steer clear of tech and retreat into the fantasy worlds of my favorite games. Nothing in Dragon Age could possibly hurt me, right? 

Networking specialist, Cisco, has reportedly physically destroyed nearly $23 million worth of tech after it made the decision to quit operating in Russia due to the company's opposition to the war against Ukraine. Well after it made the decision, it seems, as the equipment was trashed in January despite Cisco deciding to quit Russia back in March 2022.

The report has come from CNews (via Tom's Hardware), which cites the state-run Russian news agency, TASS, as its source. So probably 100% reliable.

The equipment in question is described as mostly spare parts for Cisco devices, which reportedly totalled 1.86 billion rubles, roughly $22.9 million. Though the article also states that it's not stopping there and will be soon destroying demonstration samples and IT equipment.

Considering the company is also reported as destroying some one million rubles ($12,300) worth of office equipment, furniture, and even vehicles from its local subsidiary, it looks like Cisco is keen to ensure as much as possible stays out of Russian hands. 

It is apparently easier to simply wreck the equipment than attempt to re-export it from Russia back to the United States or other European subsidiaries, though the CNews piece does note that other companies, such as SAP, have been able to negotiate mass sale dumps of equipment around various tech sanctions.

There may also be more Cisco mass scrappings in the future as the primary Russian subsidiary, Cisco Systems, is not alone. Cisco Solutions, a secondary subsidiary also deals in electronic and telecommunications tech, as well as spare parts. The expectation is that it too will start to break down its existing equipment.

The main company, however, has already put on record some $67 million in terms of its losses owing to pulling out of Russia in its Q3 results of 2022. The Tom's Hardware report notes these as 'non-recurring charges' linked to equipment that could not be recovered and the supporting expenses paid to employees in the areas which it has pulled back from.

But as Tom's also notes, with operating revenue of nearly $13.6 billion, the numbers linked to its exit from Russia are pretty small fry in the grand scheme of things. In fact it's only a few day's income if you look at its $2.8 million income in the three months of Q3 this year.

Robert Metcalfe, one of the principal engineers behind ethernet, has finally been handed a Turing Award by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), some five decades after his invention came to be. Fifty years seems like a long time, though the man appears to have been so busy accepting awards he wouldn't have had time to show up for a Turing Award.

In the bibliographic section of his Turing award announcement, it goes through the many recognitions Metcalfe has seen for his work. These include "the National Medal of Technology, IEEE Medal of Honor, Marconi Prize, Japan Computer & Communications Prize, ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award, and IEEE Alexander Graham Bell Medal. He is a Fellow of the US National Academy of Engineering, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the National Inventors, Consumer Electronics, and Internet Halls of Fame", to name a few.

Bob's a little bit decorated, then.

After landing himself two Bachelor of Science degrees from MIT—one in electrical engineering, the other in industrial management—Metcalfe achieved an applied mathematics Masters at Harvard.

He originally pitched his PhD thesis to Harvard around improving networking, but it was dismissed as being not theoretical enough. So fell by the wayside his plan to connect the university's computers up to the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPAnet), the first operational packet switching network, and where Internet Protocol (IP addresses) originated. And while Harvard turned its nose up, MIT welcomed the innovation, recruiting him into Project Mac to carry out his connective dreams.

It was as he designed and built an Arpanet interface for a new PARC computer that he and co-inventor David Boggs brought the ethernet to life. Its success was down to the two ironing out the current telephone network's data log jam issues, which had meant the networks weren't being used to their full potential. Inspired by, and revised from the University of Hawaii's attempts to connect its many islands through the ALOHAnet, ethernet made packet data transfer a breeze.

It was enough for Metcalfe to convince Harvard to award him an MSc, and with his fervent application and continued advocacy over the years, ethernet went on to become standardised across the globe.

What's interesting is how ethernet was originally dubbed the "Ether Network." When you say it back makes all this sound very ghost-in-the-machine, but according to the International Journal of Communication the name has some pretty metaphysical ancient ties.

Not only had Aristotle invoked the word ether to describe the fundamental matter of all things, Newton spoke of it as the substance that "freely pervades the pores of all bodies". Or as Joe Milutis calls it in his 2006 book Ether: The Nothing That Connects Everything, "the irrational element of Newton's rational universe".

And you can bet the spiritualists gobbled the word up, but the main reference Metcalfe and Boggs seem to point to is an experiment by 19th century physicists Michelson and Morley, in which they attempted (and failed) to detect the effects of a proposed "aether" on the Earth, a substance they had assumed energy must travel through.

It doesn't, just so we're on the same page.

"Metcalfe and Boggs affectionately dubbed the two altos on which they worked 'Michelson' and 'Morley,' thereby further acknowledging the ether influence".

From Aristotle to Metcalfe and Boggs, the ether has come a long way to connecting our world together. So Metcalfe's award is a deserving one indeed, in recognition of an invention that has truly given substance to a once pretty absurd word.

Update (3/7/2023): Gigi Sohn has asked President Biden to withdraw her nomination for FCC commissioner. In a statement sent to The Washington Post, Sohn said that she has experienced an onslaught of "unrelenting, dishonest and cruel attacks" from the cable and media industries during her stalled 16-month nomination, which has taken an "enormous toll" on her and her family.

"Unfortunately, the American people are the real losers here," wrote Sohn. "The FCC deadlock, now over two years long, will remain so for a long time. As someone who has advocated for my entire career for affordable, accessible broadband for every American, it is ironic that the 2-2 FCC will remain sidelined at the most consequential opportunity for broadband in our lifetimes. This means that your broadband will be more expensive for lack of competition, minority and underrepresented voices will be marginalized, and your private information will continue to be used and sold at the whim of your broadband provider."

Original story: Ajit Pai's FCC axed net neutrality regulations during the Trump administration, giving broadband companies in the US free rein to block or throttle websites and online services. The commission hasn't acted to restore those regulations under Biden due to a stalemate over the president's repeated nominee for commissioner, Gigi Sohn, who says her confirmation is being blocked by a telecommunications industry that fears a "pragmatic, pro-competition, pro-consumer policymaker."

The FCC is run by five commissioners, but it currently only has four: two Republicans and two Democrats. If Sohn becomes the fifth commissioner, Democrats will have the majority they need to start making policy changes, such as reinstating net neutrality rules. That would be a good thing for PC gamers—we laid out why we like net neutrality back in 2017—but Sohn's nomination has been bitterly opposed by Republicans who claim she's too partisan for the job, and her confirmation has been repeatedly thwarted.

In a prepared statement during her third confirmation hearing today, Sohn said that it is "critical for at least one member of the FCC to be a consumer advocate," and stated that the telecommunications industry has been behind "false and misleading" attacks on her record and character through "dark money groups and surrogates."

Led by Republican Senator Ted Cruz, opponents to Sohn's appointment claimed in the hearing that she misled the committee about her legal work with Locast, a non-profit which streamed over-the-air TV broadcasts on the internet until it was sued to oblivion by the major broadcast networks, an accusation she denies. Sohn was also criticized for donating to the campaigns of senators during her nomination, and her political views were interrogated. Critics say Sohn's position on the board of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a non-profit focused on internet privacy and free speech, puts her in league with "far left radicals" and that she's likely to censor conservatives in the media. A handful of Sohn's past comments and retweets, particularly a retweet of a 2020 comment from Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez about the "defund the police" slogan, were of particular interest. 

Sohn argued in response that her record of free speech advocacy has led to endorsements by right-wing networks Newsmax and OAN, along with anti-obscenity group Parents Television Council and other conservatives. Sohn also said that her membership on the EFF's board doesn't mean she agrees with all of the organization's positions, such as its support of NSA leaker Edward Snowden, who she called a "Russian asset." Regarding law enforcement, Sohn said that she only retweeted AOC's remark about the "defund the police" slogan because the representative "was explaining what she meant" by it, and that she personally finds the slogan "stupid" and "counter-productive."

"I do not support defunding the police," said Sohn. "Let me just say first that I've always respected and worked with law enforcement, ever since I was in law school, so I'm really baffled by this opposition."

It's not exactly the stuff you expect to hear from a far left radical, at least not any I know. Sohn and supporters say the real reason she's been taking heat is her record as a consumer advocate. In support of Sohn, Democratic Senator Ed Markey stated that she's one of "the single most qualified candidates for any position to ever come before the Commerce Committee for confirmation."

"Every day that Ms Sohn goes without being on the FCC is a win for giant telecommunications companies and their army of lobbyists here in Washington DC," said Markey. "It is a loss for the American people. And why do the giant companies oppose Ms Sohn? Because she believes in Darwinian, paranoia-inducing competition in the telecommunications field. She believes in consumer protections."

"This position remains vacant because the companies that are lawfully subject to oversight by the FCC don't want a watchdog," said Democratic Senator Ben Ray Luján. "They don't want to be regulated, and these companies have spent an immense amount of money and influence to keep this position vacant."

Which brings us back to the real issue here: If Congress doesn't pass any net neutrality laws one way or another, Sohn believes the FCC has the authority to adopt and enforce those regulations as it once did.

"To me, the issue is not about blocking and throttling and paid prioritization, it's about whether an agency which was created in 1934 to oversee communications networks should have the power to oversee the most powerful communications network of our time," said Sohn during today's hearing. "Congress has had two decades now to decide that authority and it's refused to do so, however I still believe Congress should do so, and I beg Congress to do so. But until then, until it does so, the agency has got to have authority."

Net neutrality regulations aside, Sohn says she's a "huge supporter" of rural broadband, and that she can help the FCC by securing more accurate broadband maps from states to ensure money is "going to the right places."

Sohn's appointment can be confirmed with a Senate vote. Reuters reports that a time for the vote has not been chosen.

Much of this story is going to sound like hokum, but bear with me because doughnut-shaped laser beams have become my new favourite scientific innovation. Especially since scientists were able to effectively create a kind of optical fibre cable from thin air. Frickin' laser beams, man. But why do we need laser-based fibre optics when we have standard glass fibre optics?

The base problem here is in using light to transfer data. While it is much faster than using metal cables, it's easy to lose data through light beam expansion as it stretches down the beam. The tactic to minimise this kind of data loss right now, which I'm sure you're familiar with, is by the use of fibre optic cables.

Fibre optic technology has been delivering us from dead-slow internet speeds since the '70s, but the kind of light beams necessary for more intense work have the potential to melt generic fibre optic cables. So, the question has remained: How can we send light-based data over long distances when fibre optics aren't an option?

Thanks to Howard Milchberg, and his team of researchers at the University of Maryland, that question may have been answered with a powerful laser beam, curled into the shape of a doughnut (via New Scientist).

By firing their laser for just 300 quadrillionths of a second, the researchers were able to create a 45 metre tubelike structure seemingly from thin air, which was able to guide a light pulse without the use of physical cabling.

The structure is known as an 'air waveguide', and works by blasting air particles with extreme heat to change their structure just enough that the light pulse stays confined. And while 45 metres may not seem like a long distance, it's a darn sight better than a previous attempt in 2014, which resulted in an air waveguide just 70 centimetres in length—not much use to anyone, but a step in the right direction.

You may be disappointed to learn this kind of tech is unlikely to end up improving your broadband speeds with super high-powered lasers. While fibre optics is a very close analog, the applications for air waveguides sit in the more obscure field of biohazard detection. Soon we could see this tech seeking out radioactive materials from miles away, though much more powerful lasers will be necessary if those kinds of distances are to be achieved.