Netgear announces its first Wi-Fi 6E router, the Nighthawk RAXE500. The tri-band router with support for Wi-Fi at 6GHZ will ship in March and will cost $600 in the United States.
The Netgear Nighthawk RAXE500 can connect to Wi-Fi devices on 2.4GHz, 5GHz and 6GHz. Connections via Wi-Fi 6E at 6GHz should provide lower latency. The theoretical maximum speed is equal to that of 5GHz connections at 4.8Gbit/s.
Netgear equips the router with an unspecified quad-core SOC, with a speed of 1.8GHz. The device has one 2.5Gbit/s Ethernet connection and four Gigabit ports. Two of those gigabit connections can be combined with link aggregation for faster transfers. Furthermore, the router has two USB 3.0 ports.
To use Wi-Fi 6E at 6GHz, clients must also support the new standard. There are currently no devices out that do that. It is expected that smartphones and TVs that support Wi-Fi 6E will be released this year. Chip manufacturers already announced chips with support for the new standard last year.
Netgear says the router will be released in the first quarter of this year. On the American Netgear website, the Nighthawk RAXE500 can be pre-ordered for $600 and it can be seen that the product will be delivered from March.