Business Choice Awards 2016: Routers

We all rely on the Internet; in the office it's doubly important. Maybe triple. The router is the workhorse piece of equipment that not only makes that connection secure, it ensures all the PCs in the office—and thus all the workers—are online. So it's time to look at the vendors making the routers PCMag readers rated best (and worst) for use at work.

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Looking for expert opinion? Read The 10 Best Wireless Routers of 2016.

Routers for Work

We had substantially fewer responses to the routers-for-work survey this year, which means a number of players didn't make the cut. That includes two-time winner Apple, and several vendors that in the past did not impress PCMag readers with what they had to offer. They include D-Link, Belkin, and Motorola.

What we're left with is an order that reflects well with last year's results, even if it is showing just a few. Top of that list: Asus, repeating its Business Choice win from last year, when it even beat Apple (the two shared the award in 2015). Asus's overall score of 8.7 (out of 10) is lower than last year's 9.0, but puts it well ahead of the competition in this list, making it a clear single winner.

Asus scored pretty well across the board, tying with Cisco for reliability (8.6), getting the lowest number of users who required technical support, and the highest score in the likelihood to be recommended column (8.5). That translated directly into Net Promoter Score (NPS) of 54 percent; the highest here, but not necessarily a barn-buster NPS. The only area in which Asus didn't best the rest was in the percentage of users who needed actual repairs; Netgear was on top here with a 24 percent, compared to Asus's 37 percent.

Asus has a huge suite of routers, but most are, at best, targeted at small businesses. Cisco, however, is practically synonymous with enterprise-sized businesses. It made the cut for this survey, but didn't get ratings from readers that gave it much credibility as a solution worth having in the network closet. It scored only 8.2 overall, tied with Netgear—and that's down from 8.4 last year and 8.6 in 2014. Cisco did score pretty well for reliability, tying with Asus at 8.6. But its tech support needs are astronomical—81 percent of users had to get help; 69 percent of Cisco users needed repairs. You better be ready to have a network admin on the phone a lot when using Cisco products.

The final two vendors in the list, Netgear and Linksys, did little to distinguish themselves. Linksys has a 56 percent need for tech support, which is bad. Netgear only had 24 percent of users who needed equipment repairs, which is better than the competition, but that's not saying much.

WINNER: ROUTERS

Business Choice seal

Asus
For the second year, Asus earns the Business Choice award from PCMag readers for its routers. The company was tops overall, and the most recommended brand. It's clear that if you need a router for the office, you should consider Asus.

Methodology

We email survey invitations to PCMag.com community members, specifically subscribers to our Readers' Choice Survey mailing list. This survey was hosted by Equation Research, which also performs our data collection. This survey was in the field from March 7, 2016 through April 11, 2016.

Respondents were asked to rate their router using multiple questions about their overall satisfaction with the solution, as well as experiences with technical support within the past 12 months.

Because the goal of the survey is to understand how the email marketing solutions compare to one another and not how one respondent's experience compares to another's, we use the average of the email marketing solutions' rating, not the average of every respondent's rating. In all cases, the overall ratings are not based on averages of other scores in the table; they are based on answers to the question, "Overall, how satisfied are you with your router for work?"

Scores not represented as a percentage are on a scale of 0 to 10 where 10 is the best.

Net Promoter Scores are based on the concept introduced by Fred Reichheld in his 2006 best seller, The Ultimate Question, that no other question can better define the loyalty of a company's customers than "how likely is it that you would recommend this company to a friend or colleague?" This measure of brand loyalty is calculated by taking the percent of respondents who answered 9 or 10 (promoters) and subtracting the percent who answered 0 through 6 (detractors). (For more, read PCMag's Top Consumer Recommended Companies for 2015.)

If you would like to participate in PCMag's monthly Readers' Choice surveys and to be eligible for our monthly sweepstakes promotion, please sign up today.

About Our Expert

Eric Griffith

Senior Editor, Features

My Experience

I've been writing about computers, the internet, and technology professionally since 1992, more than half of that time with PCMag. I arrived at the end of the print era of PC Magazine as a senior writer. I served for a time as managing editor of business coverage before settling back into the features team for the last decade and a half. I write features on all tech topics, plus I handle several special projects, including the Readers' Choice and Business Choice surveys and yearly coverage of the Best ISPs and Best Gaming ISPs, Best Products of the Year, and Best Brands (plus the Best Brands for Tech Support, Longevity, and Reliability).

I started in tech publishing right out of college, writing and editing stories about hardware and development tools. I migrated to software and hardware coverage for families, and I spent several years exclusively writing about the then-burgeoning technology called Wi-Fi. I was on the founding staff of several magazines, including Windows Sources, FamilyPC, and Access Internet Magazine. All of which are now defunct, and it's not my fault. I have freelanced for publications as diverse as Sony Style, Playboy.com, and Flux. I got my degree at Ithaca College in, of all things, television/radio. But I minored in writing so I'd have a future.

In my long-lost free time, I wrote some novels, a couple of which are not just on my hard drive: BETA TEST ("an unusually lighthearted apocalyptic tale," according to Publishers' Weekly) and a YA book called KALI: THE GHOSTING OF SEPULCHER BAY. Go get them on Kindle.

I work from my home in Ithaca, NY, and did it long before pandemics made it cool.

The Technology I Use

My first computer was a Laser 128, an Apple II-compatible clone with an integrated keyboard, matched with an eye-straining monochrome green monitor. I used it to type papers in college for other people for money...until I discovered the Mac SE in the college computer room. That changed my life. My first cellphone was a Samsung Uproar—the silver one with the built-in MP3 player from the Napster days (the pre-iPod era).

I use an iPhone 15 Pro hourly and an iPad Air infrequently (but I'm always in the market for a cheap Android tablet). I have a PlayStation 5 just to play Spider-Man, and several Windows machines, including a work-issued Lenovo ThinkPad. I talk to Alexa and Siri all day long. I do the majority of my computing on a 15-inch LG Gram laptop attached to a Thunderbolt hub to run a multi-monitor setup—I overdid it on the power needed to simply work from home.

I'm most at home in Microsoft Word after decades of writing there. More and more, I turn to services like Google Docs, using tools like Grammarly. I use Google's Chrome browser due to an addiction to several extensions I think I can't live without, but probably could. I use Excel extensively on data-intensive stories, but for chart creation, we've switched over entirely to using Infogram for interactive features that are hard to find elsewhere. I do a lot of graphics work for my stories, but limit myself to the free and amazing Paint.NET software to edit images.

I'm a firm evangelist for using the cloud for backup and syncing of files; I'm primarily using Dropbox, which has never failed me, but I also have redundant setups on Microsoft OneDrive, plus extra picture backups on Amazon Photos and iCloud. Why take chances? For entertainment, mine is a streaming-only household—my kid has never seen network TV and barely been exposed to commercials, thanks to Roku and Amazon Music. The house is peppered with smart speakers from Amazon for instant gratification and control of smart home devices like multiple Wyze cameras and Nest Protect smoke detectors. I've got accounts on all the major social networks, to my horror. I have a robot vacuum for each floor of the house. I want a 3D printer, but not sure what I'd use it for.

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