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NETGEAR's New Nighthawk Has 10GbE and 802.11ad

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Julio Urquidi

News Editor
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NETGEAR's R9000 Nighthawk X10 joins TP-LINK's Talon AD7200 as the second consumer router to include 60 GHz 802.11ad connectivity. The company says 802.11ad will support 4K video streaming, high-speed file transfer and low-latency VR gaming when paired with 802.11ad devices.

The new quad stream router is powered by a 1.7 GHz Annapurna Labs quad-core processor and has 1 GB of DDR3 SDRAM. Maximum link rates are 800 Mbps at 2.4 GHz, 1733 Mbps at 5 GHz, and 4600 Mbps at 60 GHz. MU-MIMO is supported on the 5 GHz radio.

The Nighthawk X10 is also the first consumer router to include a 10GbE SFP+ LAN port along with its Gigabit Ethernet WAN and six LAN ports, two of which support link aggregation.

Two USB 3.0 ports support storage sharing via SMB and NETGEAR ’s ReadyCloud and ReadyShare storage services. Six months of free unlimited Amazon Drive cloud backup is also bundled in.
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Other features include built-in Plex Media Server with a three-month Plex Pass and new NETGEAR Up iOS and Android apps for quick and easy setup.

The NETGEAR R9000 Nighthawk X10 sets a new high in consumer Wi-Fi router pricing at an MSRP of $499.99 and is available now.
 
$500, really? I'd rather buy a cheaper router and a cheap NAS then. Interesting they've gone with Annapurna, didn't they get bought out by Amazon?
 
$500, really? I'd rather buy a cheaper router and a cheap NAS then. Interesting they've gone with Annapurna, didn't they get bought out by Amazon?
See my post in the other thread.

Yes, Annapurna is owned by Amazon. But they continue to provide processors to the general market.
 
It is like a Netgear R7800 but without the AD part and more than half the price.
 
So what is this thing for? It doesn't seem to make a lot of sense.
It does if you're used to building really big networks for a home. The two LACP ports let you run a second 802.11ac or 802.11ad WAP with 2 Gbps of throughput to it, to provide additional coverage for a larger home. The other 4 GigE ports are for client devices plugged directly into it, and the SFP+ port is to uplink to a switch.

If you put this in your office, it can either be used to run a second WAP on the other side of the house directly from it, or uplinked to a central switch in the wiring closet using fiber optic (or 10 GbE over copper, for that matter), so that it can exceed 1 Gbps of throughput.

The three things it's missing: 802.3bz multi-gig support, PoE on the LACP ports themselves, and a faster than GigE option for a WAN connection (which isn't needed much now, but may be in the future). It's for a home where dropping $500 on a router is a minimal amount of the total cost of the network.
 
It does if you're used to building really big networks for a home. The two LACP ports let you run a second 802.11ac or 802.11ad WAP with 2 Gbps of throughput to it, to provide additional coverage for a larger home. The other 4 GigE ports are for client devices plugged directly into it, and the SFP+ port is to uplink to a switch.

Most home networks don't need the kind of BW that 10Gb can offer... it's nice for the 1 percent than might, but there, who knows...

If you put this in your office, it can either be used to run a second WAP on the other side of the house directly from it, or uplinked to a central switch in the wiring closet using fiber optic (or 10 GbE over copper, for that matter), so that it can exceed 1 Gbps of throughput.

My current router (not consumer based) can do this now... But it's probably outside of the need/requirements/skills to set it up for most mortals...

that being said - bring this caliber of gear into the home, which most of these will end up, not in small biz, but home, it is a bit of overkill...

The three things it's missing: 802.3bz multi-gig support, PoE on the LACP ports themselves, and a faster than GigE option for a WAN connection (which isn't needed much now, but may be in the future). It's for a home where dropping $500 on a router is a minimal amount of the total cost of the network.

It really comes down to needs/requirements - whether it's the big honking DinoBeast of a consumer AP like this, or the user-friendly and excellent WiFi, yet limited in routing like the Orbi...

Nobody is going to be happy - but I appreciate Netgear's efforts here...
 
Most home networks don't need the kind of BW that 10Gb can offer...
I also don't have something used by mere moral home users - mine is much larger, with L3 switches and the like. I do know of a few users for whom this would be useful, in the 6000+ Sq Ft range, where it's easier to do this than to have a bunch of business grade equipment. At $500, it's definitely not the router for everybody, or even for all but a fraction of the 1%, but it's still good to have on the market as an option.
 
For the price, they should really give it at least 6, 10 GbE ports. Once a few major router makers move to having multiple 10 GbE ports, you will begin to see even budget laptops, and budget desktop PC motherboards begin to include them.

In order to leave the obsolete 1 GbE behind, someone has to make the first move and fully switch to it, which will trigger the shift in the consumer market.
 
For the price, they should really give it at least 6, 10 GbE ports. Once a few major router makers move to having multiple 10 GbE ports, you will begin to see even budget laptops, and budget desktop PC motherboards begin to include them.

In order to leave the obsolete 1 GbE behind, someone has to make the first move and fully switch to it, which will trigger the shift in the consumer market.

It would have been nice to have two SFP ports...but I'm guessing that with the AL514, one of the two ports built into the chip is interfacing with the 11ad chipset...

That plus eSATA - which after digging into the chip specs, wouldn't have been a big cost add, as SATA is already in the chip...
 
Once a few major router makers move to having multiple 10 GbE ports, you will begin to see even budget laptops, and budget desktop PC motherboards begin to include them.

I think we'll see more more 2.5Gbe/5Gbe ports on desktops, as this is a lot less painful to implement than 10Gbe...

Budget laptops are losing ports left and right, it's getting harder to find low end laptops with anything but wireless these days, and as Tim mentions above, 1*1:1 802.11n (and we're starting to see some single stream 11ac in 2H2016) is still very common...
 
but I'm guessing that with the AL514, one of the two ports built into the chip is interfacing with the 11ad chipset...
I think that's a good guess, SFX. I'm told the X10 doesn't have the 1 Gbps bandwidth limit for the 11ad radio I found on the TP-Link Talon AD7200.
 
I see it more as once a high bandwidth link becomes commonplace, the consumer market will adapt to take advantage of it, and we will get new innovations. For example, no one would have attempted to develop a HD streaming service like netflix if everyone was still on dialup.
We have to think about how many innovations are simply not being developed because of simple throughput limitations that have not changed for the average user for so many years.
 
Yes, Annapurna is owned by Amazon. But they continue to provide processors to the general market.
The NETGEAR ReadyNAS RN202, RN204, RN212 and RN214 all also use Annapurna CPUs.
 

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