Netgear Releases Wi-Fi 6 Annex 802.11ax Router with Futuristic Design

Netgear has announced the Nighthawk RAX80 and RAX120. They are the manufacturer’s first routers to support the 802.11ax standard for Wi-Fi, and they stand out for their spaceship-like design.

The Nighthawk RAX80 AX6000 has two upright ‘wings’ in which four antennas are incorporated. The router can handle eight streams: four in the 2.4GHz band and four in 5GHz. The streams can be 160MHz wide at 5GHz, so that, for example, mobile devices that support this can use speeds up to 1Gbit/s. Intel’s recent 802.11ac network cards, among others, support this, under the name ‘Gigabit Wifi’.

Being an 802.11ax model, this means the router can utilize network capacity more efficiently than 802.11ac variants, including support for ofdm, or orthogonal frequency-division multiple access, mu-mimo for both upstream and downstream, and 1024 -QAM modulation. The Wi-Fi Alliance plans to call 802.11ax Wi-Fi 6, but the specification is not finalized yet. Netgear acknowledges in the fine print on the product page that the RAX80 may not support all features of the specification.

The RAX80 has an ARMv8 soc with four Cortex A53 cores and a clock speed of 1.8GHz. There are six gigabit Ethernet ports, one of which is a WAN port and five LAN ports. The router supports link aggregation to combine two Ethernet ports for faster speeds. There are also two USB3.0 ports. The Nighthawk RAX80 will be released in December and has a suggested retail price of $400 in the US.

Netgear has also already announced the RAX120, which will be released in the first quarter of 2019. It has eight antennas, supports twelve streams and has a processor that works at 2.2GHz. This router has also been certified for wpa3 from launch. For the RAX80, this certification will follow at a later date.