Netgear Nighthawk RS100

Don't be put off by the low price-this budget Wi-Fi7 router delivers a decent helping of speed and range

- DARIEN GRAHAM-SMITH

Price £108 (£130 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk

In the past 18 months we've seen a succession of Wi-Fi 7 routers from Netgear. First came the top-tier Nighthawk RS700S (see issue 353, p76), with a steep launch price of £800; sensing that this might be beyond the budget of most upgraders, the company followed up with more affordable RS300 and RS200 models, costing (neatly enough) £300 and £200 respectively. The latest arrival is the cheapest model yet, and though Netgear hasn't quite got the price down to a round ton, at £130 it's still aggressively inexpensive.

As you'd expect, the hardware you get for that money is decidedly cut down compared to the premium model. Where the RS700 boasts a top speed of 11.5Gbits/sec on its 6GHz radio, the RS100... well, actually it doesn't have a 6GHz radio at all. For this budget router, Netgear has stuck with a classic dual-band design, with 2x2 MIMO and a top speed of 2.9Gbits/sec on the 5GHz band - considerably slower than many Wi-Fi 6 routers we've tested.

That's not the only compromise. The RS100 doesn't support the fat 320MHz channel width that was introduced with Wi-Fi 7, nor does it implement the new multilink operation mode, so you can't aggregate the 2.4GHz and 5GHz radios into one high-bandwidth, high-resilience connection.