For around the same price, the ASUS RT-AC68U delivers even better throughput, but those who pick up the R7000 won’t be disappointed. Get more in Netgear Nighthawk Smart WiFi router (R7000) – AC1900 review. If you need a high-performance 802.11ac router for a fairly affordable price, look no further than Netgear’s $190 R7000. While it lacks the reach for filling a larger home with data, it delivers solid speeds along with easy-to-use software.
Pros & Cons – Netgear Nighthawk Smart WiFi router (R7000) – AC1900
PROS
- Sharp design.
- Great throughput at 5GHz.
- Excellent range.
- Wonderful QoS.
- Full VPN capability.
CONS
- Less-than-expected throughput at 2.4GHz band.
- Painful Bridge mode configuration.
- Slow to apply settings changes.
Specs
Size: 2.0 x 11.2 x 7.3-inches
Number of Antennas/Removable: 3/Yes
Wi-Fi Spec: AC 1.9 dual-band 802.11ac
Ports: 4 gigabit Ethernet, USB 2.0 (back), USB 3.0 (front)
Peak 802.11ac performance: 444.8Mbps
Range in 2.4GHz mode: 140 feet
Price
Still, at the current price of $200/AU$319, it’s a great deal when compared with the similarly configured and recently reviewed Asus RT-AC68U. Some $20 cheaper, it makes a formidable contender to the Asus counterpart, and it’s definitely a much better deal than the new AirPort Extreme for Mac users.
Netgear Nighthawk Smart WiFi router (R7000) – AC1900 review
Build
It is different from other boring designs of most of the Netgear models. It features sharp angular lines. It has a black matte finish, which does not retain fingerprints. Also, R7000 has a plastic case but this does not mean the device is not sturdy.
Design
The R7000 is a large router. It measures 1.97″ x 11.22″ x 7.26″ (HWD) and weighs a little over 1.6 pounds. Netgear revamped the design from its last release of dual-band routers including the Centria($433.99 at Amazon) and the R6300, both of which have an upright design with the devices meant to operate vertically in attached bases.
Ports
There are two USB ports; one on the front of the router and the second on the rear. The front port is USB 3.0 and the back port is USB 2.0. The USB 3.0 port was deliberately placed on the front, away from the 2.4GHz radio, to reduce Wi-Fi signal interference. Both ports support USB storage and printers.
On the back panel are Gigabit WAN and four Gigabit LAN ports, a reset button, and a power button. LEDs on the top of the router indicate wireless, Internet, USB device connection, and other network activity status.
Hardware
Inside the Nighthawk is a dual-core 1GHz processor—powerful, for a consumer router. The R7000 supports 600Mbps at 2.4GHz and up to 1300Mbps at the 5GHz band. Three external antennas ship with the router and attach to the back panel. The R7000 also has 128MB flash memory and 256MB RAM.
Beamforming
The decent range coverage is courtesy of a feature called Beamforming +. Beamforming is a wireless technology that directs a wireless signal from a router to wireless clients, improving throughput and signal strength. Beamforming + is an enhanced version of this technology that Netgear has baked into the R7000 for the 5GHz band.
Speed
At a distance of about 15 feet testing away from the R7000, the connection between my test wireless client the router had an average speed of 174Mbps. This excellent data rate (in an environment with lots of access points) was achieved using Netgear’s latest 11ac USB adapter, the A6100.
Supported format
In my trial, the router could handle hard drives formatted in FAT32 or NTFS, and the USB ports provided enough juice to power any portable bus-powered external drives. It could also support hard drives of top capacities. Once a drive is plugged in, its contents will be immediately shared across the network with everybody having full access to it.
Netgear Nighthawk Smart WiFi router (R7000) – AC1900 Setup
Similar to the R6100, the R7000 is very easy to set up. The router comes with a preset Wi-Fi network with its name and password printed on a label on its bottom for the 2.4GHz band. (The 5GHz band network’s name is that of the 2.4GHz network plus the “-5G” suffix and shares the same password. Note that these networks’ names are visible to Wi-Fi clients). With this information, you just can just plug the router to an internet source using the included network cable, turn it on and you’re good to go.
If you lose this label, once everything is plugged in, the first time you run the browser from a connected device, it will take you to the router’s Netgear Genie Web interface.
Genie Software
As is the case with the R8000, the R7000’s Genie software has apps for PCs, Macs, iOS and Android devices. On the other hand, you can tap into the system’s settings by pointing a Web browser window at the router’s home address.
Genie’s main screen provides a nice overview, showing how many clients are connected, which bands are active, the guest network’s status, whether the parental controls are in use and the connected USB devices.
QoS
Enabling QoS requires configuring a few settings in the interface. You can turn on WMM (Wi-Fi MultiMedia) for either the 2.4 or 5GHz signals (or both). WMM, is a feature that will give priority to multimedia data, such as video or audio streams.
I tested playing a Netflix movie while wirelessly connected to the R7000, at first with these QoS settings disabled. The time from when I clicked “play” on my movie choice and from when I saw the start of the movie was 21 seconds.
NAS
With the USB ports, you get some NAS functionality in the R7000. The NAS capability is Netgear’s ReadyShare technology. I attached a Western Digital My Passport drive to the USB 3.0 port. There is an area in the router’s interface for managing attached storage. Drives can be configured to support HTTP/HTTPS or FTP access. You can also create network folders via ReadyShare.
Parental control
The common features include two guest networks (one for each frequency band), and a host of customizable settings OpenDNS-based parental controls. All of these have been available in previous Netgear routers.
First introduced with the WNR2000 in 2009, Parental Controls works with a free account of OpenDNS. Once an account has been created, you can download and install the Netgear Live Parental Controls Management Utility (available for both Windows and Mac) to associate the router with the account. The software then can be used to manage this feature.
Netgear Nighthawk Smart WiFi router (R7000) – AC1900 performance review
I did a file copy of a 1.5GB video clip to the attached My Passport. The Write speed was a little under 11 MBps. This is absolutely typical speed for copying a large file wirelessly to a USB storage device. You will want to use the NAS functionality for smaller file sharing. If you want to share large files or stream video within your home network, you are better off getting a dedicated NAS, or at least, connect your client device via Ethernet cable to the Nighthawk when you want to work with an attached USB drive and large files.
n 5-GHz mode, the R7000’s ability to move 353.8 Mbps of data at 5 feet was well above the average throughput of 315.2 Mbps and ahead of the $300 R8000’s showing of 302.3 Mbps. The R700 was second best compared to the ASUS RT-AC68U’s mark of 361.3 Mbps.
Netgear Nighthawk Smart WiFi router (R7000) – AC1900 customer review
Incredible router, and an installation tip…
I needed to replace my old Linksys that was six years old, and beginning to drop the 2.4 GHz channel at random times during the day. I picked this router due to the high ratings in Consumer Reports, plus my local Best Buy had it in stock. This is an outstanding router. VERY fast with a STRONG signal, and the Nighthawk phone app is amazing as well. But here’s a VERY important installation tip. At first I couldn’t get it to connect to my modem – no internet. All of my connected ethernet cables were recognized immediately, but the “Internet” LED kept blinking orange.
I swapped out cables between the router and my modem, reset the modem, etc… I played with it for an hour and a half. Nothing worked. So I made a call to my provider, Xfinity tech support. An amazing tech at Xfinity (who just happened to have the same router) told me that I needed to change the default factory password (which was “password”) before it would connect. Apparently that is a security concern with Netgear, but that step wasn’t mentioned anywhere in the documentation, which was sparse to begin with. Once I did that, it came to life. This thing is incredible. I’m now getting speeds like never before, and the signal meter on my phone is a solid 100% around my house, even if I go out to the backyard.
Last night I ran a speed test (over WiFi) on my Surface Pro, which is in my living room a floor below. It registered a blazing 200mbps over Wifi. (I’m on a 250mbps plan with Xfinity). That is just incredible for a WiFi signal. My old Linksys router never even got to 100mbps, even if I used the 5GHz band. It also comes with a feature called Smart Connect which automatically detects each device, and determines which ones should be connected to the 2.4GHz channel and which ones would be better on the 5GHz channel.
I checked it after I enabled it, and sure enough it had moved a few devices around, like my DirecTV Genie II server, which can stream 4K content was now on the 5GHz. And this router has another amazing feature – it displayed a popup during setup that said that if I were to rename the wireless connections (2.4 & 5GHz channels) to the same names and passwords as the old router, it would make sure that I wouldn’t need to reconfigure any of my devices. And I couldn’t believe it, but it WORKED. I have probably three dozen or more wireless devices in my home – security cameras, smart plugs, smart watch, phone, laptops, my home thermostat, an Alexa Spot and several Echos, TV’s, my DirecTV Genie server, Google Home Hub, and even my car is connected for Sync updates.
I didn’t have to reconfigure one single device in my house. Not one. Every one simply reconnected once I did the name and password change using the old credentials. That alone made this purchase all the better. I had expected to spend the afternoon going around and reconnecting everything after I made a list beforehand, which was 2 pages long.
By johnpittsburgh at Best Buy
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