Netgear ushers in Gigabit Wi-Fi with first 802.11ac router
Summary: The networking company looks poised to be the first with a next-generation router on the market with speeds up to three times faster than 802.11n.
Netgear has introduced the R6300 WiFi Router, which is the first 802.11ac dual-band gigabit Wi-Fi router capable of speeds over 1Gbps on a wireless network.
Netgear R6300 Dual Band Gigabit WiFi Router
The next-generation router is backwards-compatible with 802.11a/b/g/n technology and operates in dual band, with speeds potentially reaching 1300Mbps over 5Ghz, and 450Mbps over 2.4Ghz. The R6300 runs on a Wi-Fi chip from Broadcom.
The sleekly designed router is designed to deliver gigabit wireless speeds that are three times faster than today’s 802.11n routers, allowing users to send multiple streams of HD video across a wireless network.
The 802.11ac standard, which is headed toward finalization by the IEEE later this year, is capable of the high throughput because it extends the techniques used in 802.11n to provide wider channel bandwidth, more MIMO spatial streams, multi-user MIMO, and additional modulation modes.
The R6300, marketed as "5G Wi-Fi" will be priced at $199.99; Netgear plans to begin shipping it in May.
D-Link and other competitors also plan to follow suit with 802.11ac products slated for release in 2012.
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Talkback
Sounds good but ...
2. My ISP doesn't like me replacing their router (read: voids contract).
3. What I'd really like is a router which could fail over between an ADSL and 3G connection.
Any ideas?
Will not need to replace your ISP router perhaps
There is an option for you
Be aware that 3G routers rarely allow full speed
I eventually went back to plugging the USB modem into a spare silent Atom laptop (Sony P Series) that runs ICS to share the connection and assign IP addresses. Makes you wonder what these routers are running if a lowly Atom single-core CPU can run Win7 Ultimate and still run rings around them. Our 4G connection works very well this way.
We run the laptop into a GbE wireless n router for the portable devices and on to several GbE switches for the desktops and entertainment devices.
But what is its actual throughput?
@Patanjali .. ditto!
After all, what's the point of having a gigabit router when the bottleneck is the broadband service? When we have gigabit broadband (really!) - that gives throughput (uplink/downlink) of 100's of Mb's to Gb's / second of throughput, then we'll have something worth talking about here.
well
But there is a very good reason to have gigabit WiFi in the home, especially if you have centralized video and are streaming to multiple locations in the home.