The Nighthawk RAXE500 was one of the first-out-of-the-gate Wi-Fi 6E routers, and in my estimation, the only one so far to truly show the promise of Wi-Fi 6E. While other existing 6E routers I’ve used have been impressive, allowing me to peek behind the curtains to see the low-latency, high-bandwidth future of Wi-Fi, Netgear’s initial release in this space was the first one to throw the curtains wide. It was prohibitively expensive, however, and overkill for most networks.
As you’d expect, now that the early adopters have had their day in the sun, Netgear is bringing the technology down the price tier a bit with their announcement of the Tri-Band Nighthawk RAXE300 ahead of CES 2022. It’s expected to cost $399 at release, and will bear the same winged, internal-antenna design used on other Nighthawk routers. The RAXE300 has a few small physical differences, however, like a USB-C port rather than dual USB 3.0 ports, and a matte black plastic appearance, as opposed to glossy. Otherwise, port selection is the same, with a single gigabit WAN port, four gigabit LAN ports—two of which support link aggregation—and a single 2.5 Gbps configurable LAN/WAN port. If you have a DOCSIS 3.1 modem and the right Internet plan, WAN link aggregation is likewise supported.
The RAXE300 changes things up with a single USB-C port, but otherwise offers the same port selection.
Netgear
Internal differences include a quad-core CPU that’s clocked ever-so-slightly lower than before, at 1.7GHz instead of the 1.8GHz found in the RAXE500. The RAXE300 also loses four spatial streams, transmitting and receiving over a still-very-good eight MU-MIMO streams. Four of the remaining streams are given to the more commonly used 5GHz band, while the 6GHz band is de-emphasized, left with only two spatial streams, or a total link speed of 2.4Gbps. Except for the edgiest of edge case users, I doubt most people would see any meaningful difference. It’s possible that more users would notice some degradation in 2.4GHz throughput, as two streams are likewise cut here, dropping total available link bandwidth to 600MHz, which is fairly low for this price range.
8 spatial streams are divided up to favor the 5GHz band.
Netgear
Netgear says the RAXE300 will cover up to 2,500 sq. ft., or a mid-to-large home. Netgear uses the same figure for the RAXE500 but in comparison charts they say it will cover a very large home. My guess is both fall closely on either side of a somewhat arbitrary dividing line—2,500 is a nice, round number, after all—and we won’t see any marked difference, but we’ll try to suss that out when we can get our hands on one for direct comparison.
The Nighthawk EAX50 offers mesh-like performance without the need to replace your current router.
Netgear
The company also announced a new Wi-Fi 6 mesh extender that uses Netgear’s Smart Roaming technology, which sees the extender behaving more like a mesh node than a traditional extender. Named the Netgear Nighthawk EAX50, it promises up to 5.4Gbps over six spatial streams, and the smart roaming feature means it can share the same SSID as your parent network without the typical connection-dropping conflicts you would expect with a normal extender so configured. However, being an extender, you can add it to any network; it needn’t be made up of Netgear equipment. Finally, the device will have a single gigabit port, allowing users to either connect it to the network via ethernet, or connect other devices to the extender. The device will be available Q1 2022 for $180.
Wes Davis is a reformed touring country musician with a longstanding infatuation with technology that began with a Commodore 64, continued with navigating file systems in MS-DOS and writing fantasy novels on a Macintosh Performa 550. Now, his days are occupied with cycling, fatherhood, networking tech, and fixing what ain’t broke with smart home gear.
