Netgear Nighthawk XR1000
Excellent wireless, but we demand more ports
WE’RE NOT SURE if Netgear uses Vantablack to coat its Nighthawk routers, but we can report that a DSLR’s autofocus has trouble locking onto one. The surface is matte, and drinks light in so effectively that a few red grilles have been added to aid customers in actually seeing the unit they’ve paid all those dollars for.
The big news with this Nighthawk model is the Wi-Fi 6 (the friendly name for 802.11ax), which tops out at a theoretical 4.8Gbps if you’re using a 4x4 client card that can use the 160MHz band. That’s pretty good, though in practice you’ll only get near it with a very recent PCIe card. A recent MacBook Pro, iPad Pro, or PlayStation 5, or the more common 2x2 cards, can still potentially transfer data at gigabit speeds over the airwaves, though we found that it tends to go in bursts of speed and drops down to around 1Mbps in between.
Despite all this Wi-Fi tech, there’s a fairly standard arrangement of ports at the back of the XR1000. Four gigabit LAN ports, one WAN connection, one USB 3.0, and the four ports for aerials join the on/ off switch, power coupling, and reset button. We’re starting to expect better than this—support for multi-gig fibre broadband, perhaps, with 2.5Gb LAN ports, or at least the aggregation of two Ethernet sockets into a faster one, as seen on Netgear’s own RAX80. Of course, if you’ve got a load of modern wireless devices, you’re much less likely to be using an extensive Ethernet network, but we look sadly at our networked storage with its rock-solid wired connection and lament the ways of the future.
Inside the XR1000 there’s a triple-core processor with 512MB of RAM and 256MB of flash storage. It runs DumaOS 3, a rather flashy OS if you’re used to the austere black-and-white functionality of other routers. Here there’s color, and charts, and add-ons called Rapps! And you have to pay $60 a year for security!
What’s that? Yes, Netgear Armor is included with this router, but only for a month. After that you need to pay a subscription to continue with its services—which are comprehensive—or live without them. We’re used to thinking of security as good and its absence as bad, but baulk at paying a subscription on top of a router that’s the same price as a CPU upgrade. The presence of WPA3 means your wireless networks are secure, at least.
But back to the OS. While we found it a little sluggish in operation, with plenty of screen time for the "please wait" message, there’s no denying that it’s a step forward for routers to have this level of graphical presentation, especially on the map view that ranks gaming servers by location and ping.
GAMING NEEDS
Everything about the XR1000 is designed to move gaming data around swiftly and wirelessly, and at this it largely succeeds, but it is always reliant on the other links in the chain performing at their best too. Putting the XR1000 at the heart of a modest home network in a suburban house, with a mixture of wired and wireless connections, we had no complaints about range or availability.
Copying large amounts of data showed up a weakness in the wireless connection compared to wired, but that was in stability, not speed—exactly what we would have expected, and not something we noticed while streaming or gaming.
Sure, we’d have liked more ports, and faster ones too, but wires are not what this router is about, and it makes for a fantastic upgrade over older wireless technology. If you’re equipped with the latest Wi-Fi 6 technology, then you can expect improved transfer speeds over Wi-Fi 5, the additional bandwidth helping on a congested home network too. And if low ping is important, the XR1000 has the technology to cherry-pick servers to bring it down.