NETGEAR R7500 Nighthawk X4 AC2350 Router

[TonyH]

Will this finally motivate companies to make faster wifi adapters. It see (really want to upgrade the laptop wifi adapter, but no one makes any 3 stream 802.11ac adapters for laptops (which could be argued as the platform that needs it the most.

2 stream 802.11ac adapters should have been skipped and made so that smartphones will get 1 stream 802.11ac adapters, and laptops and high performance tablets would get 3 stream 802.11ac.

Hi,
Really I want to see more laptops with third antenna as a spare installed in anticipation. Adding third antenna is PITA most of time when I did..

 

[house]

some more infos : http://goo.gl/aKeVvw

 

[Shikami]

Curious about VPN, since it is offloaded in hardware

 

[RogerSC]

Quantenna won't be a big obstacle. Both myself and DD-WRT are supporting the RT-AC87 which also has the Quantenna SoC for the 5 GHz band. I wouldn't be surprised to see DD-WRT eventually also support this router, unless the Qualcomm side of things proves to be an obstacle.

I do see various references to open source firmware coming...we'll see *smile*. I'd really like to see that for this router.

 

[drawz]

Not exactly. You still have the 2.4 GHz environment where the main firmware + routing will sit. That one will still be limited to the Kernel supported by the manufacturer of the SoC running in this environment (in this case, Qualcomm).

You would need to have a complete solution inside the QTN environment to be able to run any kernel you wanted for the environment that handles routing. So far, QTN only provides the 5 GHz environment.

There's already early support in the kernel and openwrt for ipq806x, so the main firmware + routing should be a non-issue. Really just a question of how to interface to the QTN 5 GHz stuff.

 

[RMerlin]

There's already early support in the kernel and openwrt for ipq806x, so the main firmware + routing should be a non-issue. Really just a question of how to interface to the QTN 5 GHz stuff.

And that part isn't a problem, since the client library is open source.

https://github.com/RMerl/asuswrt-merlin/tree/master/release/src/router/libqcsapi_client

Just a lot of work to implement. But if there's now two different router using this chipset, it might make it more worthwhile for a developer to devote time to this, compared to the WRT1900AC where all the work would be toward only one single router model using the same hardware.

 

[Madpacket]

Any ideas what would better form an open source support perspective? This new Netgear or the recently released Asus RT-87?

 

[RMerlin]

Any ideas what would better form an open source support perspective? This new Netgear or the recently released Asus RT-87?

Too early to say. The RT-AC87U already has my own firmware, but it's not a major change over the stock firmware.

Brainslayer started implementing support for the RT-AC87U in DD-WRT, but no idea if it's in a working state. I suspect that once he gets it working, it should be trivial for him to also support the R7500. Historically DD-WRT has had pretty good Netgear support, in part due to Kong being a Netgear user himself.

If an open-source firmware is your ultimate goal, I'd say wait and see. Don't buy now based on future expectations, like it recently happened with another router.

 

[Madpacket]

Too early to say. The RT-AC87U already has my own firmware, but it's not a major change over the stock firmware.

Brainslayer started implementing support for the RT-AC87U in DD-WRT, but no idea if it's in a working state. I suspect that once he gets it working, it should be trivial for him to also support the R7500. Historically DD-WRT has had pretty good Netgear support, in part due to Kong being a Netgear user himself.

If an open-source firmware is your ultimate goal, I'd say wait and see. Don't buy now based on future expectations, like it recently happened with another router.

Great thanks for the response. I actually ended up buying the RT-87U already (and like it so far) but a friend mentioned he's interested in the 7500 and was wondering about open source support.

 

[Shikami]

This is not a good router. There are actually many cons to this router. This will be place holder and when I get a chance to edit this; and I shall soon. But I must say do not buy this router-it is very disappointing. Yes, I have had the pleasure of testing this out. To say the least...it is sloooooooooow. Interface, browsing, etc......do not go for this.

 

[RogerSC]

This is not a good router. There are actually many cons to this router. This will be place holder and when I get a chance to edit this; and I shall soon. But I must say do not buy this router-it is very disappointing. Yes, I have had the pleasure of testing this out. To say the least...it is sloooooooooow. Interface, browsing, etc......do not go for this.

I've heard some good things about this one, interested to hear about your experiences.

 

[theveterans]

This is not a good router. There are actually many cons to this router. This will be place holder and when I get a chance to edit this; and I shall soon. But I must say do not buy this router-it is very disappointing. Yes, I have had the pleasure of testing this out. To say the least...it is sloooooooooow. Interface, browsing, etc......do not go for this.

CNET's review confirmed what you're experiencing.

 

[Mordred]

A slow interface. If that's the only problem, then I wouldn't care. I usually configure it once, after that I forget about the interface unless the device needs a reset and configure every few days. LOL. But if you are a WRT 1900AC user, then this is important.

Regarding opensource. As I already mentioned the netgear gpl code is based on openwrt, so it is actually already possible to easily create your own build.
I bet my butt, that you will see official openwrt support for it. Someone at myopenrouter already mentions openwrt support.
Looking at myopenrouter download links, I'm also sure you will see dd-wrt for it, all of the latest models are supported by dd-wrt.
The R7000 is one of the units dd-wrt devs recommend.

The HW of the R7500 is incredible and I'm looking forward to a SNB review I don't trust CNET reviews.

Netgear and Asus do a pretty good job lately with their hardware, I had units from both of them in the last 2 years and they have been working great after their firmwares stabilized. But the R7000 was already superior in terms of cooling and performance and I'm pretty sure the R7500 will be even better with the 1.4Ghz cooling and eSata and 2 usb 3 ports. Funny though that the R7500 model will probably beat their top model R8000

 

[cc666]

A slow interface. If that's the only problem, then I wouldn't care. I usually configure it once, after that I forget about the interface unless the device needs a reset and configure every few days. LOL. But if you are a WRT 1900AC user, then this is important.

Regarding opensource. As I already mentioned the netgear gpl code is based on openwrt, so it is actually already possible to easily create your own build.
I bet my butt, that you will see official openwrt support for it. Someone at myopenrouter already mentions openwrt support.
Looking at myopenrouter download links, I'm also sure you will see dd-wrt for it, all of the latest models are supported by dd-wrt.
The R7000 is one of the units dd-wrt devs recommend.

The HW of the R7500 is incredible and I'm looking forward to a SNB review I don't trust CNET reviews.

Netgear and Asus do a pretty good job lately with their hardware, I had units from both of them in the last 2 years and they have been working great after their firmwares stabilized. But the R7000 was already superior in terms of cooling and performance and I'm pretty sure the R7500 will be even better with the 1.4Ghz cooling and eSata and 2 usb 3 ports. Funny though that the R7500 model will probably beat their top model R8000

Agree from experience, currently running the R7500 perfectly and very fast. I see no evidence of a slow interface. The interface is just as fast as the RT AC87 I returned!

CC

 

[RMerlin]

Slow interface reports: I wonder if maybe you are affected by the same thing that affects Asus users. If you are using ESet's security software, try disabling web filtering on your router's IP.

 

[Shikami]

Merlin, one day when I am in Canada I am going to find you and treat you to some "Bro" beers for all the work you do.

Actually that wasn't the problem. The router boot time is very, very long. Setup takes for ever, with the rebooting and saving of the settings. Web browsing from page to page is a very noticeable difference in comparison to the R7000, gaming was nominal and it was also nice to see that the UPnP entries are being removed properly (R7000 does not).

It runs very, very cool, lights are visible and bleed out from the front end, also the lights are for activity only (slow rhythmic blink). They do not show actually packet activity (I never like that). It does not have any audible noise that seems to be characteristic of the Broadcom AC chips.

USB was a bit moody with the flash drives I tried; one would not mount and that was a first time ever. Was getting a nominal write speed 17MB/s, but after I saw that one port was renegotiated to the GbE switch to 100Mb, I said no-no. Once I plugged the R7000 back in all was nominal and faster.

I finally pulled the plug on making a pfSense router, and I'll just use the R7000 for AP. Personally, in my opinion, I would not touch this router at all. It is a disappointment to see this. However, I think it is possibly an issue that can be resolved later, but I would not want to deal with it for the time that it is as so.

 

[house]

Agree from experience, currently running the R7500 perfectly and very fast. I see no evidence of a slow interface.
CC

same here, there is no lag in gui speed :/ also network performance is better than my old RT-AC68U. take a look, put this into gtranslator : http://openitforum.pl/topic/658-netgear-r7500-nighthawk-x4-ac2350/

 

[house]

Slow interface reports: I wonder if maybe you are affected by the same thing that affects Asus users. If you are using ESet's security software, try disabling web filtering on your router's IP.

It affects also R7000 without any security/malware/virus protection software in OS. Think that this is OS related :/

 

[RMerlin]

Actually that wasn't the problem. The router boot time is very, very long.

Long bootime will probably be a problem with all Quantenna-based devices. The way these typically work (at least in the case of the RT-AC87, I didn't check the R7500 code), the router first starts booting its regular Broadcom firmware. It starts a tftpd server, then it points it as a boot image (for Asus, that boot image is located in /tmp), and waits for the Quantenna CPU's bootloader to pickup that boot image over tftp, and boot its own firmware on its own CPU. On the Asus router, this usually adds around 25 seconds to the boot time.

This might indeed get annoying if you have a router that must frequently fully reboot itself. Not sure this can be helped, short of having manufacturers put the Quantenna firmware in a flash location, and have it boot from it instead of over tftp in the middle of the regular boot process.

 

[Shikami]

I wouldn't be surprised if it is a combination. Something feels off overall with the host device. It seems that the power saving control may be a bit off too. As if the processor is not at proper clocks for the workload or is too conservative with the clocks. Perhaps, some synchronization issue with the secondary SoC (demsg would be very-very nice) ? All speculation, but I think if I made a video all could see the differences and this can be compared to other units. It was obviously slower, IMO; especially in comparison to my R7000.

An example, if this can be one, is on the R7000: Log in, loading of "basic" mapping page small delay, select option within menu, selection loaded.

Log in to R7500, loading of "basic" mapping page delay, delay, delay, delay, loaded. Selection of menu option, delay and a little more, loaded. Not what it should be with the hardware, should just as or more snappy.