The Netgear RS200 Nighthawk Is a Great Router for WiFi-Hungry Households
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WiFi routers work best when they go unnoticed. Obviously, that applies literally—most of us want to set up our networking gear out of sight, behind a TV or tucked behind the sofa—but it also applies to their performance. The best WiFi routers open the door for you (and everyone in your home) to get the fastest possible speeds from your home internet across every device in your home: You should be able to sit down at your laptop to work or fire up the TV afterward to stream a movie without experiencing any buffering or slow-loading web pages, even when you're scrolling on your phone at the same time.
And that's what you get from the Netgear Nighthawk RS200, which I recently recommended as the best overall router in Popular Mechanics' latest round of WiFi router testing . Its dual-band WiFi 7 connection was strong enough to keep my fleet of home tech running smoothly at peak bandwidth, even while downloading large files or streaming multiple movies in 4K. And it did not flinch in the face of signal-blocking obstacles like thick pre–World War II apartment walls. Since it seems capable of handling just about anything that I, a tech obsessive, can throw at it, I feel very comfortable saying that it's going to feel like a huge upgrade to most home networking setups.
- Blazing-fast 5-GHz band speed
- Six streams is more than typical for the price
- Attractive, slim design
- Speed on 2.4-GHz band is just average
- Monthly subscription to access advanced settings, including parental controls
Enough Bandwidth to Go Around
Let's start with the basics: The RS200 Nighthawk is a WiFi 7-enabled, dual-band router. WiFi 7 is the current wireless standard, but only routers released in the last two years support it. Even now, many budget routers (and devices) only support WiFi 6 or 6E. Upgrading to a WiFi 7 router will open the door to faster peak speeds and more efficient signal traffic (for faster loads) across the board. This is going to be true for any WiFi 7 router, but it plays a key role in RS200's performance.
Likewise, dual-band support is basic, but crucial to understand because it sets up what the RS200 does well and hits a sweet spot for performance and value. Dual-band routers can connect to devices across two frequency bands. You get 2.4 GHz, the most common option with the longest range, and 5 GHz, which connects much faster but has a much shorter range and is more susceptible to interference from walls and other obstacles.
It's worth pointing out that there are more "powerful" routers out there, including tri- and quad-band frequency support, but faster bands like 6 GHz are not supported by many devices and have even shorter ranges. I've found that tri- and quad-band devices tend to be overkill at home, unless you're buying one for a small business where you may have many laptops connecting via 5 GHz and want to free up some bandwidth.
Ultimately, what the RS200 does best—or at least better than most routers that the average person is willing to pay for—is juggling signals from many devices at once. It's able to do this because it supports a large number of wireless channels within each frequency band—four on 5 GHz, and two more on 2.4 GHz. Wireless channels operate like lanes on a highway: They allow the router to juggle demands of multiple devices without creating a connectivity logjam. In modern households, it isn't hard to reach a point when you have more than six devices on the network at once, but it generally takes several devices making constant, simultaneous demands on the router to slow it down.
And that's why the RS200 feels like a huge upgrade. In homes with one or two people, it would be hard to actively use enough devices at the same time to make that happen. Even with a larger family, it will take a home full of multitaskers to even start taxing the system.
Built for Speed
The 5 GHz band, at a combined maximum data transfer speed of 5.8 gigabits per second (Gbps), was among the fastest routers I've tested. I broke out three laptops, a TCL smart TV, an iPad Air, and my iPhone to see how many devices could stream 4K content at once, and the RS200 Nighthawk didn't even hiccup. I even spooled up a large download of some book material for a recent work project on one of the laptops, a truly mammoth collection of photographs and scans from a year's worth of research, and the router handled that, too. If you were to stick the RS200 Nighthawk in, say, a small office building, then I'm sure you could overwhelm it. But for a typical home it did a fine job of multitasking lots of demanding connections at the same time without making me pull my hair out in frustration.
By contrast, the RS200's 2.4 GHz band is merely okay. It does no better than other, less expensive routers I've tested, with two simultaneous streams of 700 Mbps. That's not bad, but it isn't exactly going to set the world on fire. It's perfectly fine for devices where you won't notice a difference between working fine and working great. When I connected my smartphone or a tablet to the 2.4 GHz band, it was more than fast enough to handle scrolling and late-night emails. But when I needed to upload a whole bunch of high-quality photos to the Cloud, I switched over to the 5 GHz band because patience isn't one of my greatest virtues.
Reaching for Better Coverage
The effective range you will get from the RS200 (or any router) will vary based on a few environmental variables, including the number of walls there are between the device and the router, and the density of the materials used to make those walls. My 100-year-old New York apartment building is always a challenging environment for WiFi routers, since its layout is long and L-shaped, the outer walls are brick, the interior walls are unusually thick, and a recent renovation replaced the wooden studs with steel studs.
Nevertheless, the RS200 Nighthawk's 2.4 GHz range had no problem providing my smartphone and tablet with four full bars of WiFi signal when I was as far away from the router as possible. Even when I left my apartment and wandered around the lobby, I got enough signal to use my phone. The 5 GHz band, predictably, struggled more at the extremes of my apartment, as 5 GHz bands tend to. But in the same room as my router, I received a full-strength signal that wasn't upset at all by microwaves or Bluetooth-connected sound systems. The connection was rock-steady.
Those who'd prefer not to worry about the signal instability and slowdowns from WiFi channel congestion, electrical signal interference, or physical interference can take advantage of the Ethernet ports on the back of the router: 1 x 2.5 Gb (WAN), 1 x 2.5 Gb (LAN), 3 x 1 Gb (LAN). Pricier, higher-end routers often have a 10 Gb Ethernet LAN port for connections to other devices within the same building and on the same network, but the RS200 Nighthawk's lack of one is mostly irrelevant. A 10 Gbps connection is useful for, say, a small business that's sending and receiving files to a bunch of devices connected to the same in-building network, and less so for a single household accessing the regular internet. Even a 1 Gb fiber-optic internet connection these days is considered crazy fast. The RS200 Nighthawk's 2.5 Gb and 1 Gb ports won't seduce anyone with spec-sheet clout, but they're plenty for real-world use in a typical family home.
It Has Advanced Controls… But You Have to Pay Extra
The RS200 Nighthawk includes a suite of on-router security services called Netgear Armor. These include threat detection, blocking malicious sites, vulnerability checks, ad blocking, anti-tracking protection, and a virtual private network (VPN). Netgear Armor is powered by Bitdefender, which is a trustworthy name in personal online security that's been around for a long time.
All the same, I'd say skip Netgear Armor. All of the aforementioned protections worked fine enough but no better than those built into most internet browsers and operating systems. Netgear Armor also costs $100 per year, and doesn't include parental controls, for which Netgear offers a secondary annual subscription at $8 or $70 per year. Suddenly, with so many ongoing, perennial subscriptions, the RS200 Nighthawk becomes vastly more expensive. I'd choose to spend that money on a good third-party VPN, such as NordVPN .
The basic controls, at least, work quite well. Netgear's Nighthawk app makes it simple to access the router's settings without having to log in to an obscure router control page on your computer's browser. Apps are more intuitive, and you may not always have a laptop nearby when you need to change the router's settings. I found it reasonably intuitive to use and navigate, which isn't always the case with networking interfaces.
Who Should Buy the Netgear Nighthawk RS200?
The Netgear RS200 Nighthawk will be a huge upgrade for most homes, especially if you're still using a router provided by your ISP. It is fast enough to provide a family of four or five with plenty of room for everybody to stream TV, game online, and browse the internet all at once. With that kind of performance, you won't have to think about the RS200 Nighthawk at all. And that's exactly what we want our routers to do.
If you have a very large household—let's say seven or more—or you need a router for a small business, I'd recommend setting your sights a little higher. Netgear makes a more powerful tri-band Nighthawk, the Netgear RS700S , which supports an additional 6 GHz band and higher maximum data speeds. Similarly, if your home extends beyond 3,000 square feet , I would recommend upgrading to a multipoint mesh network , rather than a stand-alone router.
More of Our Favorite Routers
TP-Link Archer BE3600 Dual-Band WiFi Router
Netgear RS700S Nighthawk Tri-Band WiFi Router
Eero 7 Dual-Band Mesh WiFi Router
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