This post was done in partnership with The Wirecutter, a list of the best technology products to buy. Read the full article at TheWirecutter.com.

After spending a total of 200 hours researching and testing more than 20 Wi-Fi routers, plus analyzing reader comments and feedback, the $100 TP-Link Archer C7 (v2) is the router we recommend for most people right now. This dual-band, three-stream wireless-ac router usually costs between $80 and $100—the same price as many older, slower routers. But unlike those slower routers, the C7 supports the fastest connections of every major device you can buy today (or already own).

We compared the Archer C7 against 21 different routers over a 10-month testing period. On most of our tests, the Archer C7 was the fastest—outperforming routers that cost twice as much. You won't find a better-performing router than the Archer C7 for less, and you'll have to spend a lot more money to get a better one.

How we picked

Wireless-ac, or IEEE 802.11ac, is the latest mainstream Wi-Fi version. It's the new standard in many laptops, smartphones, and tablets from 2013 and later, including many of our recommendations at the Wirecutter. New MacBooks and high-end Windows laptops have wireless-ac, and so do almost all flagship smartphones from the past year: the iPhone 6, HTC One, Moto X, Samsung Galaxy S5, and more. Unless you go very cheap, your next gadget with Wi-Fi will probably have wireless-ac. Your new router should have wireless-ac, too.

Our Wi-Fi router pick is dual-band, which means it supports both 2.4GHz and 5GHz signals—giving you a way to escape 2.4GHz wireless interference from your neighbors' Wi-Fi networks and giving you access to the much faster speeds of 5GHz wireless-ac. Our AC1750 pick also supports three spatial streams (also called data streams) on each band. The vast majority of laptops, phones, and tablets support one or two streams, but high-end laptops like the MacBook Pro support three. A three-stream wireless-ac router ensures that you're going to get the fastest connection on any device you own—or plan to buy in the near future.

The 5GHz band (used by wireless-n and -ac) is less crowded and can be much faster, but it can have worse range than 2.4GHz, and not every device supports it. Any router you buy should be dual-band: a 2.4GHz band for wireless-n and earlier, and a 5GHz band for wireless-n and -ac.

There are more powerful routers out there, like triple-band AC3200 routers that run two 5GHz networks at the same time. That only helps if you have a lot of top-end devices all doing high-bandwidth tasks at the same time. For most people reading this guide, the extra $100 you'll pay won't actually make your connection any better for the majority of your device usage.

Four-stream AC2350 routers will probably be faster than our three-stream pick once somebody makes a four-stream device—or when manufacturers enable multi-user multiple-input multiple-output (MU-MIMO) on these routers. However, we don't yet know how today's devices will perform with these $250+ routers, so we don't recommend trying to future-proof your network with one right now.

As for AC1900 routers, they use a Broadcom technology called TurboQAM to boost the maximum speeds on their 2.4GHz bands to 600Mbps (versus an AC1750 router's 450Mbps). You won't experience this speed boost unless your devices support TurboQAM (most don't).

How we tested

We evaluated our finalists' short- and long-range performance on their 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands. To test, we put each router in the same location and set up four client testing spots in a 2,577-square foot, one-story house. We set up two locations within sight of the router (at 11 feet and 43 feet) and two test stations blocked by walls, rooms, and other objects (at 13 feet and 43 feet).

We tested the routers using Jperf. The server was a desktop PC connected to each router via gigabit Ethernet, and we used a mix of three clients across various iterations of our testing. We ran each test multiple times for each router, on each band, at each test location. We also used Jperf to simulate five clients connecting simultaneously—like when you and your housemates surf the Web, stream movies, and play games at the same time. You can read more details of our testing protocol in our full guide.