Netgear Nighthawk XR1000

Excellent wireless, but we demand more ports

- IAN EVENDEN

WE’RE NOT SURE if Netgear uses Vantablack to coat its Nighthawk routers, but we can report that a DSLR’s autofocus has trouble locking onto one. The surface is matte, and drinks light in so effectively that a few red grilles have been added to aid customers in actually seeing the unit they’ve paid all those dollars for.

The big news with this Nighthawk model is the Wi-Fi 6 (the friendly name for 802.11ax), which tops out at a theoretical 4.8Gbps if you’re using a 4x4 client card that can use the 160MHz band. That’s pretty good, though in practice you’ll only get near it with a very recent PCIe card. A recent MacBook Pro, iPad Pro, or PlayStation 5, or the more common 2x2 cards, can still potentially transfer data at gigabit speeds over the airwaves, though we found that it tends to go in bursts of speed and drops down to around 1Mbps in between.