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Spain, Madrid
1 Level
724 Review
73 Karma

Review on πŸ”΄ NETGEAR R7500 Nighthawk X4 AC2350 Dual Band WiFi Router (No Longer Available) by Bryan Cavalcante

Revainrating 5 out of 5

Very good after a few hurdles in setting up

Fast, easy to use, very efficient router, great for gamers and media connected home population, you have wireless devices that can use what the router is capable of. It's a 1.7Gbps quad lane router at 5GHz, and it certainly did in my testing. FIRST - I was sent version 2 of this router which uses different firmware than version 1 which had so many complaints. Don't mix them up, it's easy to do this on the Netgears website when updating the firmware. I've had the router for 3 days and have had ups and downs (almost thought it was broken) but now that I've set it up it's working great. I am very knowledgeable about wireless devices and have thoroughly tested the R7500 v2 and related applications. I personally have a router because I have so many point-to-point media devices and multiple media servers running locally. So I was more interested in the local traffic and the overall throughput that the router can provide. I will be brief in the review, but after updating the firmware to 1.0.2.2 there was a serious problem. I have 7 5GHz wireless devices (from iPads, Android phones, computers, etc.) with average connection speeds between 250Mbps and 1.3Gbps. As well as wired gigabit devices. Initially (before the firmware update) the router worked very well. I was able to make the most of the network to transfer large files (10+GB movies at a time). Then, after about 2 hours of excellent work, the network abruptly stopped. The connection speed of all WLAN devices dropped to 54 Mbit/s (mostly WLAN G) - and wired gigabit network; Slow motion file transfer speeds (wired or wireless) dropped to around 4MB/s. How has this affected the wireless or wired network? Rebooting the router did nothing. I updated the firmware to 1.0.2.2 - same thing. My LAN ac was slower than my internet lol After about an hour rebooting, turning off standby etc. Factory reset the router. with new firmware already installed. I didn't want to do a complete reset because I had to reconfigure everything. But he fixed everything. Therefore, I would advise you to immediately update the firmware and perform a factory reset before setting up your home network. I think the OS and drivers for the CPU (memory offload controller) hang and the router goes into "failsafe mode", hence the super slow 54Mbps local speed on both wired and wireless connections. In fact, I have a full-size USB 3.0 powered SEAGATE backup hard drive (it has its own power supply) plugged directly into the router's USB 3.0 ports and files at around 4MB/s even transferred to the local drive. (yes megabytes per second). Now the same drive is hitting 90MB/s, which is the record for the drive. So be warned, if you get it wrong - firmware, then reset - then setup. But now it works fantastic. OFFER? I live on an acre and can see the router from my living room (it's mounted high on the wall by the window). Now I've been using a Nexus 6 with a dual channel antenna that allows 768Mbps connection (I've tried an iPad/iPhone but they couldn't go over 300Mbps in single channel) and I haven't noticed any significant drop in speed, until I was about 150 to 200 feet from the point where the link dropped to about 24Mbps on 5GHz. I don't use the 2.4GHz spectrum because it's too polluted by other radios I have, but when more range is required the 2.4GHz spectrum is preferred (double the range with the same output power at lower speeds). So as far as the range of the router goes, it's as good as I could have hoped for - fantastic! These routers don't really go much further BUT you can buy HIGH GAIN antennas and the router will pick them up, increasing its range VERY much (just a thought). Would I buy again - yes! It works great. It has fantastic range (no router is perfect, but this one works great for my needs). HE FAST! Not only the transfer speed but also the processor of this thing screams. I've tried overloading the router, transferring very, very large files from many locations to each other and making the most of the wireless connection, and the processor never flexed. I'm very impressed. I then put Revain Prime HD movies on the laptop, Netflix HD on the iPad, YoutUbe 4K videos on the TV - NOTHING stuttered or buffered (considering my internet yelling) but it was during file transfer. QOS on the router handles high priority traffic better than any router I've ever used. This prevented the playing media from dropping the nonsensical, low-priority traffic I had intentionally plagued them with.

Pros
  • Next Generation Wave 2 Wi-Fi Prevention of Denial of Service (DoS) attacks
Cons
  • Not bad, but...