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Routers used to be seen as a purely functional device with a bunch of unsightly antennas that you'd hide inside a room, now they're designed to be Apple-esque things that are beautiful to look at. Some of these newfangled WiFi routers are here today ; others are coming soon. We ’ll be putting many of their claims to the test as the devices appear on the market. And we’ve already tested theEeroandGoogle Asus OnHubrouters — which had split results compared to other routers in our labs. Here’s what the newcomers are promising. Probably the biggest complaint among WiFi users is that there are places in the house where wireless signals don't quite reach. There are a number of solutions to this, including the use of WiFi extenders, but these can be a pain to use and they’re not always effective. For one thing, many of them use the same radios for both receiving and sending data, which cuts their throughput, or speed. Most of these repeaters also create a secondary network you must manually log onto during setup. Routers like the Eero and Luma( promised for June) take a different approach. Instead of one box sitting in the middle of your house beaming radio signals in all directions, these companies let you deploy multiple routers that communicate via mesh networking — so the WiFi router in your living room connects to the one in your study, which talks to the one upstairs in the master bedroom, and so on, blanketing your house in WiFi signals. In addition to testing Eero routers in our lab, both as a standalone device and as a three-pack, we installed a set of them in an editor's home, and found that the system largely lived up to its claims for wide coverage and easy setup. Every new generation of router technology is faster than the previous one. Routers that use the current WiFi radio protocol( known as 802.11 ac) can handle more data than those based on the previous protocol( 802.11 n) — and all of the recommended routers in our Ratings adhere to 802.11. ac. The next-generation devices, called.