If you’re moving in the direction of a smart home, or even just have a lot of devices, your router is working a lot harder than it used to. In fact, earlier wifi routers were designed to manage a half-dozen or so devices, but now you might have dozens or more competing for bandwidth.
It’s time for an upgrade, and a really good option is the Netgear Nighthawk X8 AC5300…
Between smart garage door openers, smart deadbolts, smart thermostats, smart video monitoring and security systems and even smart appliances, I’ve added a lot of devices to my home network in the last year, with lots more yet to be installed. Then there’s the Amazon Echo, Netflix, Amazon Video, our computers, tablets, smartphones and who knows what else, all competing for that precious bandwidth.
This turns out to be a great challenge for the router because it needs to have smarts of its own to know that an “all okay” ping from the home security system shouldn’t cause the Netflix stream to stall and buffer. Worse, most people are running routers that were designed five or more years ago, back when the expectation was that whether for home or small office, the max number of devices that would be connecting at the same time would cap at four or five, not twenty, thirty or more.
Enter the slick and powerful Netgear Nighthawk X8 AC5300 Tri-Band Quad Stream wifi router. That’s a mouthful, no question, but Netgear has really just added every possible useful feature in a single router that’s perfect for homes – smart or not! – and offices both. It offers Smart Connect that automatically selects the fastest wifi band or “channel” for each device as it’s connected and Ethernet port aggregation to combine two hardwired connections to significantly speed up file transfers. With the Nighthawk X8 you can also implement network backup for Windows systems with ReadySHARE Vault, which is very slick.
Of course, it also includes standard router features like WPS and dynamic quality of service (the latter of which is particularly useful if you don’t have a screaming fast Internet connection), along with both a built-in VPN capability that lets you securely access your home network even while on the road, and ReadyCLOUD, which lets you dynamically access a device plugged into the USB port (there’s a USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 port, actually) also from outside your home or office network.
In fact, the USB ports are really quite interesting because through Netgear’s ReadySHARE system, anyone who connects to the network can access whatever you plug into the USB port, whether it’s a flash drive or a bigger shared network hard drive. It’s a great way to have a central music and video archive for everyone in the family, for example.
I unplugged the D-Link router I’d been using for quite a while and plugged in the Netgear Nightwing X8, which had just the right number of Ethernet ports for my hardwired devices and popped right up on the wifi network, ready to configure:
It’s a bit hard to see in the photo, but the device includes four detachable antenna to get the best possible results. You can see that it’s a typical snarl of wires and cables that it’s resting near. Honestly, I prefer not to look at this area of my office at all, so I’m in denial of how messy it is!
Network-based configuration is quite easy and it took me less than five minutes to get the new Nightwing X8 completely configured with the old network’s SSID name and password, then I just sat back and watched device after device in the house successfully connect to the new, more efficient Netgear device. Within just a minute or two, here are how many were identified by the router:
That’s a lot of devices, no wonder the network sometimes exhibits congestion and takes a few seconds to connect. Or should I say “used to” do that? My own testing couldn’t get Netflix to require buffering, even while streaming 4K programming, and not only do the main computers work great, the upload speed seems to have improved significantly. A huge win!
There’s another feature on the Nighthawk X8 that’s worth mentioning too: Parental controls. I think most parents don’t realize that they can actually enforce online/offline limits for their children without having to just unplug the router nowadays. Just set up the appropriate time and day-based rules and the X8 will do the heavy lifting, either allowing the connection or not. Finally, your children will be forced to get to sleep rather than lay in bed playing just one more game…
Sounds like a lot of features and truth be told, the AC5300 Tri-Band WiFi Router is really featureful, but the good news is that you really don’t have to use much of anything to get good results from the unit. Indeed, you don’t even have to change the wifi network name if you don’t want to, and the password is printed on the white sticker on the unit itself to help you remember its settings. The only thing that I’ll say you must change is the administrative password on the router itself, By default you connect to the admin interface with account “admin” and password “password” and that’s a disaster waiting to happen. The quick start guide explains exactly how to change this to a decent password and I strongly, strongly, encourage you to do so.
The Netgear Nighthawk X8 AC5300 Tri-Band Quad Stream wifi router really is a terrific router and it’ll set you up for years of adding more and more devices to your ever-smarter smart home, without you having to really pay much attention to it. It’s the perfect device: plug it in, configure it, then forget about it. And what better place to pick up the Nighthawk X8 than at BestBuy? You can find it on the site as SKU 4446201 or just hop onto the Connected Home area of their site.
The Nighthawk X8 AC5300 wifi router, $399.99 MSRP, on sale at BestBuy for $372.99.
Disclosure: I was compensated for this review both by receiving the device without charge and in the form of a Best Buy Gift Card.
I got the AC 1900 before the holidays. Has 3 instead of 4 antenna. But it does the job and is less expensive.