Your ancient Wi-Fi devices are stealing bandwidth from everything else, and one router setting fixes it

Legacy devices can slow down home Wi-Fi networks. When older devices with slower Wi-Fi standards connect to a network, they can force the entire access point to drop its transmission speed, hogging airtime from other devices. This can cause frustration for users with newer, high-end devices that are stuttering or dropping connections.

According to XDA Developers, this issue arises because Wi-Fi is not a simultaneous broadcast, but a shared megaphone. The presence of older devices can significantly impact network performance.

Tom's Hardware mentions a budget-friendly TP-Link Archer BE3600 wireless router, which supports Wi-Fi 7 and is available at a discounted price of $79.98, down from $119.99. This router offers strong performance for 2.4 and 5 GHz and has features such as a 2.5G LAN port and a USB 3.0 port.

Brief written by urgent.news from XDA Developers, Tom's Hardware — 2 reports on this story. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.