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Netgear’s Nighthawk RS700 is the company’s first wireless router to support the WiFi 7 standard (which hasn’t actually been approved yet, but should be soon). Among other things, this tri-band router supports to 19 Gbps of combined throughput, covers areas up to 3,500 square feet, and allows up to 200 devices to connect to your network at once.
But it’s also way more expensive than most WiFi routers marketed toward home users. It’s up for pre-order for $700 and the Nighthawk RS700 is expected to ship to customers in the second quarter of 2023.
Is it worth it? Maybe in the long run. But at launch you’ll probably be hard-pressed to find PCs, phones, or other devices that can take advantage of the speed. And I suspect that folks who wait a little while will be able to find much cheaper (if less powerful) options.
But the Nighthawk RS700 isn’t supposed to be cheap. It’s supposed to be powerful.
The tri-band router designed for high-speed, high-bandwidth, low-latency connections, enabling users to stream 8K video, VR applications, and other run other demanding applications.
In addition to WiFi 7, the router is backward compatible with earlier standards. So you should be able to use your existing laptops, smartphones, tablets, and IoT devices with the router even if they only support WiFi 4, 5, or 6 capabilities. You just won’t get all the benefits of WiFi 7.
The router also supports mesh networking if you want to pair the RS700 with other Netgear Nighhthawk mesh-compatible devices. And there’s support for high-speed wired networking as well, thanks to a 10 GbE Ethernet port and four Gigabit Ethernet ports.
But again, $700 is a lot to pay for a single router… even if it will likely be future-proof enough that you’re unlikely to need a replacement in the next 5-6 years. TP-Link’s BE24000 quad-band WiFi 7 router has a similarly steep price.
I suspect we’ll start to see mainstream WiFi 7 routers hit the market in the coming months and years, probably after the WiFi 7 standard is finalized and starts to become more widely adopted.
For $700 it would have been nice to see four 2.5GbE ethernet ports…
Are the 10 Gbps Ethernet ports a give away for the real max Wi-Fi speed?
19Gbps Wi-Fi through 10Gbit Ethernet doesn’t sound like it’ll fit.
Even if the ports can be bonded and maxed out it’s still stuck at 14Gbps Lan side and 10Gbps Wan side.
We’ve been though the releasing products before new Wi-Fi standards are ratified before, why would anyone spend that much to repeat history?
Sounds like that speed might only be possible between WLAN devices.
Wireless routers tend to report the max speed of all their network bands combined, so it’s unlikely that you’d ever actually see 19 Gbps speeds on a single transfer. It’s more like you could see that much total throughput if the 2.4 GHz, 5 GHz and 6 GHz bands are all being maxed out at the same time.
Those bands support speeds up to 1.4 Gbps, 5.8 Gbps, and 11.5 Gbps, respectively, for a total of 18.7 Gbps (which I guess Netgear rounds up to 19).
It’s purpose is to be part of the new 20,000+$ gaming system! Along with your future 4,000+$ GPU you can play Roblox at 19gbps with your online only friends! yay
That sure looks pretty darned big for a router. I can’t tell if it’s about as long as it is tall like many routers are but if it is, it’s big enough to put a couple hard drives in.
I sort of wonder if this is a trend or something or if wi-fi speeds, or the wi-fi sensing it probably has but shouldn’t, require that size. Or if the push for higher speeds has reduced the range which is why there are so many repeater systems around these days.
$700 for a router that might not even be 100% compatible with the standard once it is ratified? Let me see…pass!