Home networking gadgets for holiday gifts

Give the gift of a faster wireless Internet connection and you'll be loved forever. Here are CNET's picks for the top networking products this holiday season.

Asus RT-AC66u is the first router from Asus that supports the new 802.11ac Wi-Fi standard, as well as the rest of other Wi-Fi clients on the market. The router is good-looking, fast, and also fun to use, for both business and home users.

The My Net Central N900 is WD's answer to Apple's Time Capsule. The My Net can do all the Time Capsule can do, including native support for Time Machine, and a lot more. It's also much faster and more affordable.

The Netgear R6300 is one of the first 802.11ac routers on the market and currently is one of the best. It offers fast Wi-Fi and wired speeds and lots of advanced features, which can be managed via its Netgear Genie mobile app.

The DIR-857 is D-Link's N900 router and is one of the best on the market. The router offers top 5Ghz speed compared with its peers and a ton of nice features, including support for USB 3.0, a customized HD Fuel Qos, and Opens-based parental control.

This is the latest revision of the Airport Express and it's quite different from previous generations. For one, it now has one LAN port and a detachable power cord. On top of that it incorporates support for audio AirPlay, which allows music buffs to wirelessly stream digital audio to speakers connected to it. As a router, it is also quite fast in terms of Wi-Fi data rates.

The Linksys EA4500 is an N900 router but is unique among its peers, thanks to Cisco's new Cisco Cloud Connect approach. Now you can remotely manage your entire home network via a browser or mobile app and do a lot more than ever before with a home router. The router also offered very fast performance and can host network storage via its USB port.