Netgear is unveiling its Nighthawk Wi-Fi Range Extender with a technology that helps deliver internet to the far reaches of your home and boosts Wi-Fi speeds for each device in the home.
The Nighthawk brand has done particularly well with gamers, who often push their broadband gear in the home to the limit. It will let you stream music to your backyard, play games in the basement, or hold a video chat in the kitchen. And it takes note of the prediction that by 2022, the average home will likely have 50 devices connecting to the internet, according to market researcher NPD.
The Netgear Nighthawk X6S AC3000 Tri-band WiFi Range Extender uses FastLane3 and Smart Roaming technology to eliminate dead zones in a house. It works with any home router or internet service provider. That’s important for people who are locked into using a router by an ISP, such as Comcast and its cable modems, said Arun Kulathumony, product line manager at Netgear, in an interview with VentureBeat.
“We invented the category of Wi-Fi extenders,” he said.
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Above: The Netgear Nighthawk Wi-Fi extender has fast wireless lanes to link more devices to your network at top speed.
FastLane3 uses tri-band Wi-Fi, which can extend your network coverage an additional 2,500 square feet while reducing interference. Netgear introduced the FastLane3 technology with its Orbi Wi-Fi system, and now it is extending the technology to the Nighthawk brand so that it can accommodate connections to non-Netgear routers and any ISP.
It also uses a dedicated Wi-Fi link from the extender to your router. By contrast, many range extenders on the market use the same overcrowded channel to move data back and forth between the user’s device and the router. The extender has a quad-core processor to help improve speeds.
“In other extenders, the backhaul is shared, and that creates a traffic jam,” said Kulathumony.
With the dedicated link in the Netgear X6S extender, smartphones, tablets, computers, and TVs can get on separate channels. That gives them a fast lane back to the router on the 5-gigahertz spectrum, while a standard router uses the 2.4-gigahertz spectrum.
Above: The Netgear Nighthawk Wi-Fi extender can hand off a device to the router and vice versa.
And it uses six optimized antennae in the extender to improve reception and extend the coverage. The Nighthawk X6S Wi-Fi Extender also lets you use the same network name and password as your router, so your devices can connect automatically to the strongest signal as you move around your home.
And with Smart Roaming, the extender intelligently connects your mobile devices to the most robust Wi-Fi signal so you’ll experience better connectivity throughout the home. It can move a device seamlessly from the router to the extender.
The extender will also help you stream 4K video without stuttering or buffering. The Netgear Nighthawk X6S AC3000 Tri-band WiFi Range Extender is available now for $230.
