Netgear announces new Nighthawk X4S router

They may be for the geeks but Netgear’s Nighthawk home routers have earned a formidable reputation for sheer power and rich features.

The Netgear Nighthawk X4S. Source: Supplied

They may be for the geeks but Netgear’s Nighthawk home routers have earned a formidable reputation for sheer power and rich features with its latest model boasting Wi-Fi speeds beyond those offered through cabled Gigabit Ethernet.

The new Netgear Nighthawk X4S is a modem router that will work with both traditional ADSL and new Australian fibre-to-the-node VDSL internet services, and then distribute data on a home network using fast wireless speeds.

The X4S comes just as the traditional router model seems destined for an overhaul, with Google announcing an OnHub Wi-Fi router in its bid to disrupt the market.

We’re also about to see routers that are designed to also act as hubs for connected home networks, linking and managing all kinds of sensors and security devices at home.

Netgear says the X4S is capable of wireless speed of up to 2.54 Gigabits per second which is achieved by combining the 2.4GHz and 5GHz signals: 800Mbps at 2.4GHz and 1733Mbps at 5GHz.

But like all theoretical wireless speeds you’ll need optimal conditions. One of them is the new 256 QAM wireless standard which is hailed as an extremely efficient use of spectrum, but there’s concern it could be susceptible to interference and noise. We’ll see when we get to test it.

Netgear says the Nighthawk X4S’s modem will support legacy ADSL, ADSL2 and ADSL2+, as well as VDSL and VDSL2 found on Australian fibre-to-the-node systems.

Quad-stream Wave 2 Wi-Fi, the industry’s latest Wi-Fi technology standard, means support for up to four data streams in each Wi-Fi band, which Netgear says will maximising connection speeds for gaming and HD video streaming.

The modem router also uses beamforming+ — technology that boosts the Wi-Fi signal in the direction of where it detects devices — along with technology known as MU-MIMO.

Instead of sending data to one device at a time, the Nighthawk X4S with MU-MIMO can deliver data in parallel to multiple devices simultaneously.

“As a result, you can stream 4K video to one device while also playing an intense multi-user video game on a different device.”

And if you want the router to prioritise streaming to particular devices at home, there’s Dynamic QoS prioritisation which Netgear says recognises individual applications and the device it is running on, and prioritises their network traffic accordingly.

The modem router has 4 Gigabit Ethernet LAN ports, 2 USB3.0 ports and one eSATA port for linking external hard drives.

Users are given a personalised URL to create their own FTP server, and

you can connect a network printer which can be configured as AirPrint compatible, making it available to iPhones and iPads.

There’s also application software for automatically backing up incremental changes on all PCs in a home network to a networked USB hard drive.

Netgear says the X4S is available immediately in Australia for a recommended price of $549.