An average router ruined my smart home, especially my Nest speakers

Router ports with Ethernet cables plugged in

Credit: Rita El Khoury / Android Authority

In retrospect, I should have learned my lesson the first time. For the past year, I have been adding some smart home devices to my apartment and seeing their performance drop with each passing minute. I blamed the devices — especially my Google Nest speakers — instead of the router because I was on a fiber connection and getting 500-600Mbps speeds on my computers and phones, so how could it possibly be the router’s fault? Well, it was the router’s fault. But let’s back up.

Lesson one: A great router can save the worst connection

NETGEAR Orbi Wifi 6 straight on

LATEST ARTICLE

See Our Latest

Blog Posts

admin December 24th, 2025

Each year, the Modern Marketing Data Stack report captures a snapshot of where marketers are heading — and what’s changing […]

admin December 24th, 2025

For years, the multilayered data architecture of raw → transformed → curated has been the gold standard for transforming structured […]

admin December 24th, 2025

Welcome to Snowflake’s Startup Spotlight, where we ask startup founders about the problems they’re solving, the apps they’re building and […]