802.11ad support is just part of Netgear's recipe for what is says is the world's fastest home router.
Scheduled to ship in December for $799, the Netgear Nighthawk X10 AD7200 smart Wi-Fi router sports an impressive list of technologies.
iTWire readers will be familiar with the 2.6GHz and 5GHz frequencies used for Wi-Fi; 802.11ad uses 60GHz to obtain theoretical speeds up to 4.6Gbps with much lower latency.
"The superior capabilities of 802.11ad will greatly enhance the user experience when dealing with applications that require the transferring of large amounts of data. 802.11ad also provides approximately one-tenth the latency as compared to 802.11ac, which is absolutely critical for applications like virtual reality or augmented reality," said Signals Research Group president Michael Thelander.
{loadposition stephen08}The X10 still includes 802.11ac for another theoretical 1733+800Mpbs on 5GHz and 2.6GHz.
As we all know, real-life speeds are less than those on paper, but Netgear implies the X10 is up to the job of streaming 4K video: "Nighthawk X10 sets a new bar for performance and a new record for speed when moving large video files within your network and to the cloud," said Netgear senior vice president for home networking David Henry.
"Today's video files are getting larger with 4k and VR video. Offloading from capture devices and moving these large files within a network often becomes a time-consuming and challenging task. The Nighthawk X10 is powerful enough to move these files at unprecedented speed and provides easy access once the file is stored on the network."
Talking of video files, the X10 incorporates Plex Media Server.
Other performance features include six Gigabit Ethernet ports (with the ability to operate two particular ports as a pair in line aggregation mode for speeds up to 2Gbps), a Gigabit Ethernet WAN port, a 10Gb fibre port (to connect a NAS), two USB 3.0 ports (eg, for storage devices), and a 1.7GHz processor to keep up with all that data as well as running Plex.
A six-month Amazon Drive unlimited subscription (usually $100 a year) is included for backing up local files to the cloud.