NETGEAR - Nighthawk AX5400 WiFi 6 Router

When my trusty Nighthawk X4S gave up after several good years, I picked up this X1000 AX5400 locally despite a few bad reviews. Very glad I did. Not sure why the other reviewers had issues...was easy to set up and has been working flawlessly ever since. My old router had been struggling to keep up with a larger house and more devices. Set the SSID/password on each band to the old ones and everything connected. This Nighthawk has better range and speed than the last gen, and I haven’t had to reboot it once so far. Hitting above advertised speeds every time I test. Wifi 6 is great—36 attached devices and counting, ready for my PS5! Don’t let the bad reviews scare you, I love this thing.

The router looks nice -- it has that 80s Sega color scheme to is -- and it feels nice (very light) and its initial setup was simple. However, configuring it post-setup has been a nightmare. The DumaOS that runs this router is a severely broken app; it's as if they just skipped past QA and pushed code directly into production and deployed it to this router without any testing whatsoever. DumaOS doesn't always load (very often just hangs on a spinner), and when it occasionally does load the dashboard, it consistently gives me pop-up errors that certain pages cannot load; and most links I click on just brings up a blank broken page. It is impossible to even configure this router. I went to Netgear support for this and the support person admitted they were NOT TRAINED on DumaOS and referred me to the forums for this app. After Netgear support, I worked with the fine people at the DumaOS forums and they had me perform a lot of actions, but none worked. Some concluded that the router itself was defective, but it appears to me it's DumaOS that is defective. Using the Nighthawk App during the setup, I was forced to do a firmware upgrade to the latest, and I have no idea if whether or not this caused the issue. But I reinstalled the firmware, did multiple factory resets, used multiple browsers on multiple platforms to try and configure, and DumaOS simply will not work. I'll never trust a device that runs DumaOS going forward, this was very frustrating and very disappointing experience. Just say no to this product, or any product that runs DumaOS. This router is going back to Best Buy and I highly doubt I will get another Netgear router as I don't want to risk getting anything with DumaOS on it.

Bought two days ago. It has a triple core CPU but only uses 2 cores. It takes for ever to go to each screen when trying to set up very slow. Weak signal compared to our old Linksys router. It keeps dropping internet connection even for wired devices. The only fix it to restart the router. Completely unacceptable. Save yourself the time and hassle of this product and pick something else.

Unit just started going on and off line then went off line for good within 8 hours. It was only 2 months old. I am going to try another one as I my have gotten a lemon.

Very sad. I've been using Netgear products since the 90's when I got my first Cable Internet connection. They have always had the best range of wireless connection and great performance. I bought this to upgrade my R7000 due to my family's high demand gaming. 1. I was able to easily set up the router with the phone app. Next I wanted to enable Port Forwarding for Call of Duty Cold War. When I tried to log in to the router, it kept telling me I needed a secure connection and would not let me in. I called customer service to help. The rep could not help me log in and turned it over to advance support. I received an email confirming this with a case number. That was on 12-7-20. It is now 12-14-20 and I have had not communication with advanced support. 2. I kept trying to log in to the router and eventually got in via the DumaOS app. I set the Port Forwarding for the games I wanted and thought we were G2G. Once we started playing we found that this router continually and briefly drops your connection (possibly to refresh to a better internet path). I would call customer service to help correct this, but since I have not receive a call back for the first case number, why open a second? I will be returning this item for a refund. I understand that COVID has limited businesses all over the country, but support techs can work from home and I don't feel like Netgear has put enough effort into their customer service!

Killer speeds not one single drop in connection since day one. Super solid router for gaming and streaming. Hands down best router ever purchased the UI is very easy to navigate even for the advanced user. Love the design and has a lot of range throughout the house. I can park in my driveway and still have wifi service.

My last four routers have been Netgear and I’ve had good luck with them over the years. So I was excited to try a new Wi-Fi six router. Unfortunately, The firmware features that make it unique and targeted at gamers are not ready for prime time. Several of the on boarded router applications would crash, or did not let you configure or modify. I also had to fight with getting into the web face And eventually had to do a factory reset. Also any changes you made on the router took a long time to apply, even for the simplest modifications. Sometimes I even had to reboot my cable modem to get it to reconnect to the Internet after minor changes. The worst part is that this expensive router didn’t give me any performance boost for wireless 5 devices or on my Wi-Fi 6 devices such as a PlayStation 5, And LAN wired connection was even slower than my current router. I currently have a Netgear Nighthawk R8000. Maybe down the road when they’re firmware gets fixed it might be worth the purchase price but for now, I returned it in two days and I have moved on.

Netgear may win the "best" router awards from gadget and blog sites, but benchmarks alone cannot outweigh the horrendous router that is inside this package. Interface is slow and buggy, and the Nighthawk app is a limited featureset application. Less then 24 hours of use and it crashed the 2.4 ghz network range, and needed a reboot every few hours. Save yourself time and money and get any other router then this one.