Netgear Nighthawk RAXE300

Not quite as powerful as its top-of-the-range sibling, but still a hugely fast and versatile Wi-Fi 6E router

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PRICE £333 (£400 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk

If you’re looking for the fastest domestic router around, Netgear’s mighty Nighthawk RAXE500 (see issue 332, p64) has a firm grip on the crown. In our performance tests I measured incredible download speeds of more than 100MB/sec over Wi-Fi 6E, even from a room or two away.

However, at £550 the RAXE500 is well out of reach of most households. That’s where the RAXE300 comes in: it’s hardly a pocket-money purchase, but it’s significantly cheaper than its sibling, while aiming to provide a similar all-around experience.

If you pore over the specs you can spot where the savings have been made. The RAXE500 supports speeds of up to 4.8Gbits/sec on both the 5GHz and 6GHz bands. The RAXE300 keeps the same 5GHz radio, but chops the 6GHz bandwidth in half, to a maximum of 2.4Gbits/sec.

The RAXE300 has six antennas embedded in its upturned wings, versus the eight on the RAXE500. And while Netgear doesn’t publish details of transmission power, the RAXE300 is advertised to cover an area of 230m2, while the RAXE500 claims a much greater 325m2.

Still, it’s good to see that Netgear hasn’t ditched the single 2.5Gbits/sec Ethernet socket, which sits at the rear next to four regular Gigabit Ethernet ports. And it’s still possible to aggregate two of these together, giving you two ways to achieve a multigigabit wired connection.