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The NETGEAR Nighthawk X10 R9000 is unquestionably a very powerful wireless router. It's absolutely packed with features for the home or business user. Add a decently sized USB storage device and it can act as your NAS too. Install PLEX Media Server and it becomes the hub of your home entertainment network as well. Connect your printer and that becomes part of the network, and there are plenty of wired ports for office usage or LAN parties.
The 802.11ad WiFi knocks socks off 802.11ac for performance, but there are still question marks over its utility at the moment. The standard has been around in shipping devices for at least six months, but there are still very few client devices that support it. There's also the range to consider, which essentially necessitates placing the router in the room where you will be most likely to use 802.11ad – if you're going to use it at all.
Fortunately, the R9000 is so far from being a one-trick pony that we would be disingenuous to make any single horse-related reference at all. It's more like a herd of ponies of every imaginable size for every possible equestrian need.
The Gigabit port aggregation and 10 Gigabit SFP+ module put it in the big league for fast wired connectivity, and it's supremely quick on the wireless front even without taking the 802.11ad option into consideration. So business users are catered for as well as home users.
The only two things that might make you think twice about purchasing this router are the price and if you have a big area to cover with WiFi. The £359.99 price really is top-end these days for a non-corporate WiFi router. We would also suggest that, if you need to have fast WiFi across a big area, NETGEAR's Orbi would be the more sensible choice. However, this doesn't even come close to the R9000 in terms of features. So if you're after a single-router solution and can afford the high price of the NETGEAR Nighthawk X10 R9000, it really has the best of everything you need in one box.
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You can buy from Amazon for £409.99 HERE — but we found it cheaper on Argos for £359.99 inc vat HERE.
Pros:
- Super-fast 802.11ad WiFi.
- Class-leading 802.11ac performance at close range.
- Comprehensive administration options.
- Up to eight wired networking ports.
- Port aggregation of two Gigabit connections for fast performance.
- 10 Gigabit SPF+ port.
- Two USB 3.0 ports for storage or printers.
- Powerful underlying hardware.
- PLEX Media Server support.
Cons:
- Expensive.
- Mesh networking options like NETGEAR Orbi can cover a greater area with WiFi.
Kitguru Says: The 802.11ad may be fast, but compatible devices are currently hard to find. Fortunately, the NETGEAR Nighthawk X10 R9000 offers class-leading 802.11ac as well, and so many other features that it's well worth the high price.
Cons:
It’s a cat magnet 😀
I’m thinking about mounting it to the wall, my cat goes crazy about those antennas!
Pointless. All very well having a fast wifi connection at 1m but anyone that close to a router would surely use ethernet. Just bought an Orbi RBK50 and at anything passed 1m the Orbi smashes the R9000. The Orbi is a fantastic bit of kit because of the dedicated 5Ghz backhaul.