How all routers should look (and perform).
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Netgear's newest addition to its sweet-looking Nighthawk line of routers ups the bandwidth a bit over its previous models (and most tri-band AC routers for that matter) and is the first AC4000 router I've had a chance to examine. Dubbed the X6S (See it on Amazon) / (See it on Amazon UK), this is a tri-band router with two 5GHz bands and one legacy 2.4GHz band for older devices, and it also sports "Wave 2" AC features such as MU-MIMO as well as the ability to have it be controlled by Amazon's Alexa personal assistant.
It's pricey at $300, but that's about average for a flagship tri-band setup these days. It's designed for really large houses with 15+ devices connected, so if you're a bachelor living in a studio, it's too much router for you. It's going up against the fastest routers from Asus, Linksys, and D-Link mainly, and will appeal to large home owners, people with a ton of devices, and folks who just want a really future proof router.
Design and Features
Nothing has changed in the Nighthawk's design department, and that's a good thing. This router is long and low, with six attached antennas that flip out and into position, but can also be flipped down flush along the top for transport. It's one of the best router designs out there currently, in my opinion, as it looks aggressive without being over the top, massively huge, or just boring and conventional. The only flaw with the design is because it's so flat, all the LEDs that run up the center portion of it can't be seen easily, unless you are standing right in front of it looking down. I rarely, if ever, glance at these lights, but it would be helpful if they were positioned on the front of the router so I could glance across the room when my Internet starts acting up.
As I wrote above, the main "next gen" feature of this router is that it supports MU-MIMO, so if you have compatible wireless adapters it's able to serve up to three clients at the same time on both of its 5GHz bands for a total of six separate streams. Since it's a tri-band router you get dual 5GHz bands capable of up to 1,625Mb/s, and up to 750Mb/s on its 2.4Ghz band. The catch is that in order to achieve speeds anywhere near the rated numbers, you'll to be running three adapters or clients at once, and they will all need to be using wireless adapters that support 1024-QAM, and the only one I can find is this one from Asus. So as you can see, the vast majority of home users will never see anything even close to these speeds, but that's not really any different from how thing have been in the router world for some time now.
Out back the router has the usual suspects, with four Gigabit Ethernet ports and one Gigabit WAN port. There is one advanced feature though, which is two of the ports can be aggregated for higher bandwidth. In order to use this feature you'll need a specific NAS drive or switch that supports it though, and you can't just connect two cables to your laptop or desktop to achieve the extra bandwidth. It's primarily for deployment in enterprise and SOHO environments, so most home users will have no use for this, but business folks might.
There are also two USB ports - one USB 2.0 port for printer sharing, and one USB 3.0 port for file sharing, aka a "poor man's NAS." There's also a reset switch, power connector, and a switch to turn off the LEDs in case they are too bright. The top of the router also has a WPS switch for easy pairing, and a Wi-Fi on/off switch for when you go on vacation and are too lazy to just unplug it.
Powering the whole shebang is a 1.8GHz dual-core processor and three Broadcom SoC chips, which Netgear refers to as "offload processors." There's also 512MB of RAM in there.
Finally, it's DLNA compatible for movie streaming, and you can control this router with Amazon's Echo/Alexa devices as well as Google Home. The actual commands it can understand are incredibly limited however, and are listed here. It also supports Smart Connect, which puts all three bands under one SSID and then "intelligently" connects devices based on available bandwidth and compatibility. I've used it in the past and it works pretty well, and is great for homes with 10+ devices as nobody has to worry about trying to figure out with network to use.
Admin Software
I've covered Netgear's software in previous reviews, and it's unchanged. I've never been a fan of the color scheme it uses, which is reminiscent of an AOL chat room and is not a good match for such a sleek and powerful router. I don't know why Netgear hasn't updated this software but it is years old at this point and it shows. To its credit it works just fine, and it's easy to use and things are laid out logically.
The home screen is certainly easy to look at and understand, but once you click one-level into anything you're presented with an old school interface that is not user friendly. I wouldn't want my parents digging around in this, in other words. For example, here's the "Internet" tab.
Another pain is that Parental Controls aren't native to the device, and you have to download Netgear software and get a free OpenDNS account to apply it. Most routers just include parental controls by default, so I'm not sure why Netgear can't do the same. It's not like it's some sort of revolutionary feature.
Quality of Service is supported, which should theoretically improve things like gaming and streaming, but it's a "black box" of sorts. You just check a box and let it do its thing. It consults a "cloud based" database of packet types and prioritizes based on its information, but you can't manually prioritize one device over another, or one app over another. I can't really tell if it's working or not as it's difficult to test but to Netgear's credit it is certainly simple since you just check a box to turn it on.
Overall the admin software is ugly but usable. It makes the router not very user friendly, however. Luckily most of us rarely have to ever delve into this stuff to tweak things.
Netgear also offers a mobile app called Netgear Genie that makes administering the router super easy. It's what I would use if I needed to make changes or check on things.
The Mobile app's home screen.
The mobile app's network map.
Benchmarks
To test how the Nighthawk X6S performs, I set up a server/client scenario with Netperf and two Windows 10 PCs, then measured the speed of the TCP connection between them. I measured at both 15 feet with line of sight, and at 30 feet with two walls between the computers. I ran the TCP test at least three times to make sure my results were consistent, and if they weren't, I re-tested until they were, trying at different times of the day until I was satisfied. Though everyone’s environment is different, and you wouldn’t be able to replicate my results, they are a good way to get a ballpark estimate of how the router performs. I also performed a “real world” 2GB file transfer test at 30 feet as well.
As you can see the X6S's 5GHz wireless performance is as good as any 80211.ac router I've tested, which isn't much of a surprise. At both 15 and 30 feet it wasn't the absolute fastest, but the delta between it and the fastest router is so small it's basically a wash. The router's performance also barely changed when moving from line-of-sight at 15 feet to 30 feet with two walls in between it and the client. I've written before that some people say with 80211. ac performance actually improves at range due to how the beamforming works on AC wireless, as it needs some space to really figure out where the client is located and direct the wireless streams in that direction. Though performance didn't improve at distance with the Nighthawk, you can safely say that it didn't really diminish much, which is awesome. Overall the Nighthawk is certainly fast, and is one of the fastest router's I've tested on the 5GHz band. In the file copy test its performance was merely average, however.
2.4GHz Testing
The Nighthawk X6S's 2.4GHz performance mirrored that of the 5GHz testing, in that the X6S was very close to the fastest routers in performance, especially at 30 feet. Unlike the 5GHz testing though, this router's performance actually increased at distance, which is impressive. It was overall close enough to the Asus router to be included in its company.
Purchasing Guide
The Netgear Nighthawk X6S router has an MSRP of $299.99, but like a lot of tech it's available at a healthy discount online. It isn't uncommon to see it for sale for $40 or more off:
The Verdict
The Nighthawk X6S doesn't bring anything new to the table really, but it's fast and functional, which is what you want in a router. It's admin software is a bit too clinical for my tastes, but you don't need to spend much time in it. Support for Alexa is cool, however, but I doubt it'll sway people on the fence. Overall it's a great router as it's fast and easy to use, but as a tri-band it's only for households with a ton of devices.
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