Netgear Nighthawk X10 Wireless AD7200 Router

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Introducing the Nighthawk X10 AD7200 Smart WiFi Router (R9000)
We’ve reviewed all kinds of 802.11ac routers here at Hothardware, including audacious tri-band routers that look like spaceships, and more pedestrian dual-band routers too. The recently released Netgear Nighthawk X10 is something different though, as it’s the industry’s first 802.11ad router. You may not have heard much about 802.11ad prior to the announcement of this router, so here’s the skinny; in addition to the standard 2.4GHz B/G/N and 5GHz AC wireless, it can also operate on the 60GHz band, which theoretically allows it to deliver up to 7Gb/s of bandwidth across all three bands, hence the AD7200 moniker. That’s a massive boost from the 1.7Gb/s provided by 802.11ac alone and gives you three separate networks that resemble a timeline of technology of sorts. You’ll not only have all your older and newer devices supported by the latest standards, but also have coverage for devices that don’t even exist yet.

Aside from its 802.11ad features, which we’ll get to shortly, the X10 is basically a tri-band router that offers every single bit of the latest technology available. It supports up to 800Mb/s on its 2.4GHz band, up to 1,733Mb/s on its 5GHz band, and up to 4,600Mb/s on its 60GHz band. Netgear is rounding up a bit, but those three combined equal the 7,133Mb/s so it's advertised as an AD7200 router. 

To pull this off it not only needs that high-powered CPU, but it also features active antennas, where the amplifiers are on the antenna themselves. This router features four non-removable units, and they have blue activity LEDs on them. It supports Wave 2 MU-MIMO for up to four devices on the B/G/N/AC bands, and just one stream for 802.11ad. Since this is a Wave 2 device, it also supports 160MHz channels as well. Finally, there’s a built-in functionality for backing up a connected USB drive to Amazon Cloud.

On the back of the router there’s six Gigabit LAN ports, one WAN port, the aforementioned 10G LAN port, and there are two USB 3.0 ports on the side. The front of the router has an array of white LEDs to show connected devices and activity.