Netgear announces new Nighthawk RAXE500 (AX11000) WiFi 6E Router

Netgear has announced the new Nighthawk RAXE500 WiFi 6E router. A powerful new model for users looking to build out a busy network littered with high-performance and IoT devices. Allowing for multiple users on the network to experience high-speeds and low latencies at the same time.

Inside is a 1.8GHz quad-core processor driving everything, allowing it to support up to 60 devices throughout your network and allowing up to 10.8Gb/s of WiFi bandwidth (AX11000). That’s up to 1.2Gb/s via 2.4GHz, up to 4.8Gb/s via 5GHz, and up to 4.8Gbps via the new 6GHz. It’s like a beefed-up version of the 802.11ad (Nighthawk X10) model, only minus the 60GHz network that nobody supports (which also didn’t reach much further than a room or two).

They didn’t go with a 10G SFP+ port on the back this time (darn!), however, they did make use of a 2.5Gb/s Ethernet connection at least. Although, for the price tag, we were hoping for another model with 10G support for those of us bandwidth freaks out there.

For connectivity, you get two USB 3.0 ports for network-attached storage (that will hopefully yield faster transfer rates than 60MB/s like some of their other models). You also get four 1Gb Ethernet connections as well as that mentioned 2.5Gb Ethernet connection. Then you have the WAN port that leads out to your modem, which can also combine with port #1 through link aggregation for multi-gig internet access (and then ports 3 and 4 also support link aggregation to another device).

MSRP for this model is $599, which does place is pretty high in price. This is why we were hoping for a 10G connection to go along with everything else. Regardless, It is a hardcore router. It is simply more hard focused on wireless than wired connectivity than anything else. Making this a fantastic model for complex smart home scenarios that rely on a stable wireless network.

Netgear is planning for a February release (next month), while they don’t begin shipping until March.