Also, this particular Netgear WiFi 7 router has some added features, including a sophisticated antenna system that gives it an incredibly long range compared to Wi-Fi routers we’ve used in the past, to the point where it’s forcing us to rethink our attitude to mesh networks.
What if most households don’t need expensive mesh networks any more? What if a single, long-range WiFi 7 network were the new black, so to speak?
Let’s start with WiFi 7.
It’s a new type of Wi-Fi that builds on WiFi 6, which itself introduced a whole new, very high-speed but fairly short-range wireless frequency band (the 6 gigahertz band) on top of the old 5 GHz and even older 2.4 GHz band we all know and love.
WiFi 6 represented a huge performance jump on older Wi-Fi standards, and WiFi 7 is a huge jump on WiFi 6.
It’s 2.4 times faster than WiFi 6, has double the capacity, faster response times and handles interference from neighbouring networks better.
Better yet, WiFi 7 has a new feature called Multi-Link Operations (MLO), which allows devices to take multiple Wi-Fi connections operating on different frequencies in the 2.4GHz, 5GHz and 6GHz band, and gang them together into the one, super high speed connection.
Rather than choosing one band or the other, the way we choose either 2.4 GHz or 5GHz connections on most Wi-Fi routers nowadays (or, at least, have the router make that choice for us without us knowing it), you’ll be able to use 2.4 GHz, 5 GHz and 6 GHz all at once.
And, importantly, the overall MLO connection will steady even if one or more of the underlying connections drop out.
It will be great for people who, say, move around their house during tedious Zoom calls. You’ll be able to start the call in your study with a full MLO connection, hold on to that call without missing a single frame while you head to the laundry even though the laundry can’t get the 6 GHz band any more, and then still not miss a frame when you walk out to the backyard to hang out the washing, where you only get a 2.4GHz signal.
MLO should also be a superb technology for mesh networks – yes, we haven’t completely gotten over our love affair with mesh – because it will allow the Wi-Fi nodes to form high-speed backhaul connections with each other, dramatically improving their speed and capacity.
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But WiFi 7 is a new enough technology that, in our entire Labs, we only have two devices that support it: the Netgear router we’re reviewing, and the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra we reviewed a few weeks ago.
Our brand-new MacBooks and high-end workstations don’t have WiFi 7 yet. Our iPhones, iPads, Android tablets, TVs and smart speakers don’t have it.
Indeed, even the Nighthawk WiFi 7 router we’re reviewing doesn’t appear to have fully implemented the WiFi 7 standard yet.
As far as we can tell, it doesn’t yet have MLO, a feature that Netgear said last year it would add as a firmware update at some point, possibly at the same time the company adds mesh features to the router.
And yet!
Even without MLO, we got crazy fast results in our benchmark tests, uploading and downloading data between a server attached to the Nighthawk’s 10 Gbps ethernet port, and our WiFi 7-enabled Galaxy S24 Ultra.
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Standing right near the Nighthawk, we got upload speeds of 1.38 Gbps and download speeds of 948 Mbps, 4.6 times and 1.8 times faster than our mesh network that, until now, we had thought was the bee’s knees.
From a distance of 20 metres but still inside the labs, with brick walls and glass in between, we got download speeds of 695 Mbps. That was 46 times faster than the speed we got from our mesh network at that location, even though the mesh network had a node much closer to us than the Nighthawk was.
And here’s the bit that really changed our minds about home and office networking: at 30 metres and at 80 metres distance, with no walls but with glass in between the phone and the router, we still got download speeds of 41 Mbps and 2 Mbps, respectively, when our fancy mesh network had long since given up the ghost.
We attribute those last two results not to WiFi 7 as such – many of its innovations are in the 6 GHz band, which is inherently short-range but high-speed – but to the Netgear Nighthawk RS700S router itself.
Netgear says it’s done a lot of work optimising the antenna system in the Nighthawk to maximise its coverage area, and, well, we believe them.
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The same might be said of WiFi 7 as a whole. We believe.
Likes: Big Wi-Fi footprint. Extremely fast. Antennas are hidden, so it’s much less ugly than previous Nighthawk models.
Dislikes: User interface not as friendly as we’d like.
Price: $1499
