Netgear presents Nighthawk X4 router with support for mu-mimo

Netgear has officially announced the R7500 Nighthawk X4, after the arrival of the high-end router leaked earlier. Thanks to support for quadstream WiFi, the 802.11ac router should achieve high speeds for, among other things, online gaming and streaming content.

The router can theoretically achieve speeds of 1733Mbit/s on the 5GHz frequency, made up of four 433Mbit/s connections, and 600Mbit/s on 2.4GHz, consisting of three 200Mbit/s connections, for a total throughput of approx. 2.33Gbit/s. That speed is faster than many other WiFi-ac routers on paper offer, thanks to the support for multi-user multiple input multiple output, or mu-mimo. Quantenna’s Wave 2 technology provides that support for mu-mimo.

The router also has a Qualcomm-soc IPQ8064, with two Krait cores, both of which work at 1.4GHz. The router’s performance is comparable to that of the Asus RT-AC87, which also features Quantenna’s Wave 2 chipset, according to AnandTech, but there are some differences. Where the X4 has the Qualcomm IPQ8064 processor, the Asus runs on Broadcom BCM4709A. In addition, the X4 has both an esata interface and two USB 3.0 ports, where the Asus does it with a USB 2.0 and a 3.0 port.

The support for 4×4-mu-mimo should provide faster Wi-Fi speeds and more stable connections, but Netgear adds another feature for efficient operation. The router has a list of devices and apps that can control bandwidth allocation. Apps and programs that use buffering, such as YouTube and Netflix, are given higher priority than apps and programs that require less bandwidth. Users can update the list themselves, according to Anandtech.