Ac2200-nighthawk X4s Tri-band Wifi Mesh Extender Model Ex7500 Review

Verdict

The Nighthawk X4S extender is expensive for a Wi-Fi repeater, only it delivers excellent performance. Those distinctions are both downwardly to its tri-ring blueprint, which uses not one but two 5GHz radios, along with a 2.4GHz 1 for older devices. That translates to a big bandwidth boost over the majority of cheaper extenders, which make do with a single 5GHz radio. Physically, the Nighthawk X4S is a chunky unit and it but supports Wi-Fi five, rather than super-fast Wi-Fi 6. It has piffling in the way of advanced features, either. For what it is, though, the Netgear Nighthawk X4S is a terrific slice of kit. It delivers excellent Wi-Fi performance while beingness cheaper and easier to install than a total-blown mesh organization.

Pros

• Very fast
• Easy to confiure
• Adds mesh features to whatsoever router

Cons

• Beefy
• No Ethernet ports

Central Specifications

• Review Price: £117
• Mesh extender
• 161 10 84 10 77mm
• Wi-Fi v (866Mbps 5GHz ane,866Mbps 5GHz two,400Mbps 2.4GHz)
• Mesh, extender operating modes

If you suffer from patchy Wi-Fi at home, a repeater is normally the simplest solution. These fiddling devices plug into an electric socket and rebroadcast the radio signals from your router, providing a stronger, faster connection in areas where the router's own signal is weak.

Almost repeaters do this using a single 5GHz radio, which has to share its bandwidth between talking to your clients and connecting dorsum to the router. The Netgear Nighthawk X4S Tri-Ring Wi-Fi Range Extender adds a second 5GHz radio, which allows it to maintain a full-speed connection to your wireless clients while forwarding their traffic to the router over a 2d, separate full-speed connection. This pushes up the toll, just it also helps evangelize peak operation.

Netgear Nighthawk X4s design and features – Chunky build, but easy to prepare upwardly

The angular blueprint of the Nighthawk X4S isn't ugly, but information technology's bulky enough to limit what yous can plug into an adjacent socket. And despite its size, there's no support for wired network connections, which is a shame. What it does feature is a helpful row of blueish LEDs forth the tiptop, which show your network status at a glance, and on the side is a WPS button, which you can apply to connect devices to the network without having to enter a password.

Setup and configuration are handled via a dedicated spider web portal. You tin can cull whether to split or combine the 2.4GHz and 5GHz networks – and, optionally, give them the same name as your existing network, which allows your mobile devices to automatically switch to whichever signal is strongest as yous wander around your home. Most extenders can't practice that and take to accept their own network name, which gives the X4S a feature you lot'd normally find in a mesh network.

There's also an option to automatically plow the wireless network off and on according to a custom schedule, but there's no way to block specific devices at certain times, brusk of switching to the Connected Devices page and disabling them manually. There'south no guest network option either, although we doubt that will exist a bargain-breaker for many people.

Related: Best Wi-Fi extender

Netgear Nighthawk X4s performance – Delivers super-fast download speeds

Netgear advertises the X4S as offering connection speeds upward to 2.2Gbits/sec – but that's misleading, since it represents the combined bandwidth of all three radios running at their theoretical maximum data rates. Nonetheless, there's no denying that the X4S tin can give your network a real heave. Running the free TamoSoft Throughput Exam tool on a laptop at the back of my dwelling house, I saw average upload and download speeds of 63.6Mbits/sec and 94.3Mbits/sec over a 5GHz 802.11ac connexion direct to my router.

Afterward I'd fix upwardly the X4S in the hallway in the middle of the house, the extended network gave me a slower upload rate of 37.5Mbits/sec, but downloads arrived at a far faster 156.3Mbits/sec.

Things were fifty-fifty improve in the bedroom, where download speeds of 92.4Mbits/sec were accelerated to 220.8Mbits/sec. In the hard-to-reach bathroom, the X4S delivered a but phenomenal uplift: its download speed of 187.4Mbits/sec was more iv times as fast as the 42.6Mbits/sec I saw from the router alone.

Should you buy the Netgear Nighthawk X4S Tri-Band Wi-Fi Range Extender?

Stellar operation goes a long way to justify the high price of the X4S. If you lot actually want the very fastest connexion possible, think that this is only a Wi-Fi 5 extender, and can't match the functioning of a Wi-Fi vi system, such as the Netgear EAX80. That's more than twice the price, though – and the X4S is perfectly fast enough for 4K video streaming and other bandwidth-heavy tasks, making it the ideal upmarket extender for most homes.

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Source: https://www.trustedreviews.com/reviews/netgear-nighthawk-x4s-tri-band-wi-fi-range-extender

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