Netgear Debuts World’s Fastest Router – The Nighthawk X10

Netgear introduced the Nighthawk X10 AD7200 Smart WiFi Router which is the industry’s first and fastest router for media streaming and instant backup. It comes with ultra-fast 802.11ad wireless speeds as well as ultra fast 10GbE speeds while being designed for home use – that’s a first.

The Nighthawk X10 Smart WiFi router combines a powerful 1.7GHz Quad Core processor with Quad-Stream Wave 2 WiFi architecture plus next generation high-speed 802.11ad WiFi. This allows you to enjoy blazing-fast combined wireless speeds up to a furious 7.2Gbps. Yes, you read that right. Thanks to the use of the latest MU-MIMO technology, the Nighthawk X10 supports simultaneous streaming at 160MHz which allows full and double speed to all connected devices. Externally it features four patent-pending Active Antennas to amplify the Nighthawk X10’s WiFi signals to maximize range and the best throughput.

“The superior capabilities of ‘802.11ad will greatly enhance the user experience when dealing with applications that require the transferring of large amounts of data. 802.11ad also provides approximately one-tenth the latency as compared to 802.11ac, which is absolutely critical for applications like virtual reality or augmented reality,” said Michael Thelander, President of Signals Research Group.

We are used to dual-band routers these days, but the Nighthawk X10 is a tri-band one. It has the older 2.4 GHz band where it can perform up to 800 Mbps and the newer 5GHz band where we get up to 1733 Mbps. The third band uses the 60 GHz area where it can perform up to 4600 Mbps. Those are some serious wireless speeds.

There are seven Gigabit Ethernet ports of which one is for the WAN connection and the other six are for LAN connections. The fifth and sixth port can also be used together with Link Aggregation for double the throughput. Last but certainly not least, it comes with built-in 10 Gbps SFP+ port for a high-speed fiber connection to your 10 GbE-enabled NAS or server.

Next to the network connections, it also features two USB 3.0 ports for external storage. Those are perfect in combination with the built-in Plex Media server with transcoding for ultra-smooth 4K streaming. From locally connected storage, Plex organizes your movies, TV shows, music, video, and photo collections, making it easy to find and enjoy the content you love. Users who purchase the Nighthawk X10 also get a free three-month Plex Pass. The Nighthawk X10 also includes a six months free use of unlimited Amazon Drive backup for an off-site cloud copy of one’s files.

“Nighthawk X10 sets a new bar for performance and a new record for speed when moving large video files within your network and to the cloud,” said David Henry, senior vice president for home networking at Netgear. “Today’s video files are getting larger with 4k and VR video. Offloading from capture devices and moving these large files within a network often becomes a time-consuming and challenging task. The Nighthawk X10 is powerful enough to move these files at unprecedented speed and provides easy access once the file is stored on the network.”

You might have guessed it with all these features, the Netgear Nighthawk X10 doesn’t come cheap. It will set you back an impressive $499.00, but in return, you get the probably best router available for SOHO environments.

Key Technical Features of Nighthawk X10

• AD7200 Quad Stream Wave2 WiFi supports wireless speeds up to 4600+1733+800Mbps*
• Fastest 60GHz 802.11ad WiFi technology for instant downloads, backup, and minimal latency during online game play
• Plex Media Server for all of your media, anytime, anywhere
• Powerful 1.7GHz Quad Core Processor boosts performance for 4K streaming or VR gaming
• High-performance Active Antennas for better WiFi coverage & faster speeds
• Six (6) Gigabit Ethernet LAN ports with dual ports that can be operated in line aggregation mode for faster file transfers (up to 2Gbps wired speeds)
• Two (2) SuperSpeed USB 3.0 ports for faster streaming, backup and easy access to your stored media.
• Automatic backup to the cloud with Amazon Drive
• NETGEAR ReadyCLOUD provides easy, private and secure remote access to USB-connected storage
• 10Gigabit fiber port for lightning-fast backup and media streaming to/from ReadyNAS or other NAS
• MU-MIMO capable for simultaneous streaming of data to multiple devices
• New NETGEAR Up app will have your router up, running and configured to your liking all from the convenience of any Android or iOS mobile device.
• NETGEAR genie app for a personal dashboard to monitor, control and repair your home network, even when you’re away from home.