NETGEAR - Nighthawk Pro Gaming AC2600 Dual-Band Wi-Fi Router

Given how much we rely on the internet, it honestly surprises me that more people don’t invest good money on a router and modem. The last router and modem I bought was more than five years ago, so it was time for an upgrade. Here’s how I use the internet: I live in a 1,300 square foot condo in a congested urban area. Thick concrete and metal make up my walls, so range was an issue for me in the past (more on that in a bit). I stream 4K, HDR, play on my XBOX 1 X in 4K, download movies, play games online with my PS4 in the other room. At any given moment, I could be playing a game in one room, and my wife could be downloading something and streaming something in 4K in another room – all while we play with our phones and laptops. We also have a Nest and Sonos Playbar + Sub. Is this router worth $300? Yes. Here's why: You won’t buy one every year. We also live in a world where more and more things are connected. More importantly, this router performs fantastic. Here are some details: I pay my cable provider for 330mbps. My previous setup (Netgear N600) gave me 150mbps when I was directly in front of it. In our second room, it gave us about 20mbps; it was a bit of a dead zone and I had to get an extender to game on XBOX. With the extender, I got about 50-60mbps in the second room. Now, I’m getting 450mbps *throughout the entire house* and that’s with *NO extender.* Phenomenal. More so, this has perhaps the most user friendly software, dubbed “DUMA OS,” that I have ever used. DUMA OS shows you every single device connected to your router in instant real time (see my attached image). You can easily direct bandwidth to more important devices, such as your gaming console or PC, in seconds. Setting up Guest WiFi, etc, is extremely easy. There are more features such as “Geo Filtering,” which allows you to play games online with specific parts of the world. Yes, the entire world. There’s a VPN so disgruntled gamers can’t ruin your day with a DDoS attack. There’s more, but the important thing to note here is the DUMA OS makes using all of it very simple. This also has something called “Smart Connect.” In short, enabling it doesn’t require you to have multiple WiFi profiles (ie -- Netgear, Netgear 5G). It “smartly” diverts traffic to where bandwidth is needed most. So far, I like having one profile and so far, it is working flawlessly. During setup, there was a SNAFU and I called customer support. I was ready to return this because during the call, they told me it would be an hour because specific technicians handle calls for this specific router. Annoyed, I hung up. But, they literally called me back in an hour -- I didn’t answer the call. They called *again* and were very attentive and resolved my issue (if you have trouble during setup, do a “reset” but pushing the tiny button in the back). The tech explained to me how important this specific router is to Netgear, and gave me his personal number should I have issues in the future. I was very impressed. In short: this is worth the $300 price tag. You will have it for years. I paired this specific router with the Netgear CM600 (24x8) modem. You also don't need to be an IT pro or hardcore gamer to handle this. It's easy to setup.

I've been using Netgear's XR500 Gaming Router for a week now and I am in love. Before I received this router, I was using the Netgear Nighthawk AC 1900 (C7000-100NAS) as my modem/router combo in one. While the Nighthawk AC 1900 was nice, I hated that when my son and I both played XBox One and PS4 at the same time as my wife was watching Netflix, we'd both get lag occasionally. If we were playing CoD or Fortnight as well, I would have to remember to stop uTorrent from running on m computer as that would also kill our connections at times. With the Netgear XR500 Gaming Router, I can finally say those days are over. Now I'll admit, while I'm a bit technical, I am far from being a tech genius. So sometimes looking at the settings for my previous routers has been a bit overwhelming. That's one of the reasons I love the XR500. Installing it was probably the easiest setup I've had for a router so far. When you first log into the modem and start the process, the router automatically detects the type of connection from the modem and after a little while, provided me with my speeds. The only thing I actually had to configure myself was to change the SSID's back to what I wanted. There was no other configuration needed on my part, I didn't have to try to figure out what things meant. It was so simple that I'm sure I could have had my 10 year old son do it and it would have worked. When you log into routerlogin.net, instead of the old Netgear interface, you are pulled into something called DumaOS (which you can see in the image). I love this. The first screen is the dashboard which you can customize as you want. I have mine setup to see the internet status, wireless status, CPU Usage (of the router itself) as well as network overview and network snapshot. I absolutely love the network snapshot, and it's something I never realized before how much I would want it. I love being able to look quickly and see what devices in my house are downloading data at any time I want. It comes in really useful when I"m trying to figure out what devices are connecting to my system around the house and how much bandwidth they are clogging up. I used to worry about devices using too much data. Having to stop uTorrent when playing online, or log off of Fortnight when the wife wants to watch Netflix. I don't have to do that any more thanks to the feature I love as much (if not more, I can't decide yet) than network snapshot which is QoS (quality of service). I'll be honest, the past 3 or 4 routers I've had have had an option for QoS and I have never messed with it. It just never made sense and I couldn't figure out to change anything. With the QoS page within DumaOS, I was able to easily click on my consoles and even desktop and set the device bandwidth. The way Netgear and DumaOS has it setup, the QoS Anti-Bufferbloat only turns on when High Priority Traffic is detected (such as games...it doesn't pick up torrenting which is good). If I'm playing Fortnight on Playstation4 for example, the QoS sends 27% of the bandwidth to the PS4. I don't have to worry about Netflix or uTorrent hogging up 90% of the bandwidth as the sytem says "nope, not gonna happen." There is something else I have noticed as well. While I liked the Netgear AC 1900 Nighthawk, I didn't always get great reception/speeds around my house. My router (and office) are on the 2nd floor so I had to use Netgear Extenders to reach my living room and powerline adapters to provide constant speeds to my consoles. After using the XR500 Gaming Router for a few days, I decided to see what would happen if I unplugged the powerline adapters and connected via wirelessly, would the download/upload speeds suffer. I actually got faster download speeds via the wireless connection now. The XR500 looks like a futuristic Predator mask and I'm pretty sure it is part beast. While I did receive this router as part of the NETGEAR First Look Review Program, it did not influence my review. The only thing that did that was DumaOS and the speeds. I will say, the one thing I wish the router had, which may be possible and I haven't figured it out yet, would be the ability to whitelist a domain so that I could whitelist the online conference meeting tool I use for work (I work for home) so during the summer, I don't have to worry about my son and his friends playing Fortnight hogging the bandwidth like they did last summer. Though, at the same time, I have a feeling with the QoS settings, that's no longer going to be an issue as I can set my work computer to have a minimum amount of bandwidth as well as to not lose any connection.

Worked good , not sure about it now. Had ATT terrible, switched to Spectrum was a little better internet, now with WOW, wow guy said the router isn’t working, to take it back and get another, he said about 10% of electronic on shelves are faulty, not sure but I’ll try another

Used for 7 months. Household of 3. We game, YouTube, Hulu and it runs all our devices without buffering. I have 100 mb cable internet service it runs 105 download and 11.5 upload while someone plays Xbox and I have 2 TVs playing Hulu.

Like this product cause easy to setup and easy to use. One thing i have issue with is blocking sites. When i try to block couple site that i dont need kids to go to, it dosent work well.

This is by far the best router out there & the best I've ever owned it's super fast speeds buttery smooth gaming for consoles I have been with netgear for 4 yrs & I will stay with netgear forever netgear is the best when it comes to routers & modems I highly recommend to buy this router you'll be very happy it is expensive but it's worth the 300$ price tag

QOS rules are hard-coded for games (yes, I know it's a gaming router). I actually bought it for its ability to limit bandwidth to certain devices (limiting my nephew's total usage) but the bandwidth controls are specifically designed to prioritize gaming traffic and do not otherwise apply. Said another way, the router is built to specify which game traffic gets prioritized and/or which devices get their gaming traffic prioritized over non-gaming traffic. I have to limit my criticism, however, because I clearly bought this router for a purpose for which it was not designed. I bought it under the assumption of flexibility but it's actually rather rigid in its application. The network monitoring is buggy. Display of individual device usage is limited to 5 devices, and I have no idea how it decides which 5 it displays. As you can see in the attached screenshot, the Network Snapshot is showing 5 devices collectively using 0.0009 Mbps for download (one of them is even my thermostat) while the total usage in the Network Overview is nearing 160 Mbps of collective download. I'm not sure how that makes the snapshot particularly useful.

NETGEAR - Nighthawk Pro Gaming Wi-Fi Router. AC2600 Dual band Wi-Fi with Geo Filter, QoS, Network Monitor. Powered by DumaOS. Is a nifty little device runs quiet and has little to no heat you can turn off the indicator lights and control WiFi usage need I say more...