Netgear XR700 Gaming Router Review & Comments

Mister_Tad

Well that's the thing - "A Gamer", as in just one, can't make use of the 10Gb port on this at all, multiple users would be the only way to start to see any benefit. So if you and your nine other housemates (or probably more, since at least 4 of them would be on wireless and unlikely to hit 1Gbit even with wifi6) all decided at the exact same time that they wanted to pull down a large file from the NAS, you might see  near-1GB/sec of throughput

Having 10Gb between a PC and NAS is wonderful. Granted "need" is a strong word, but it makes a world of difference when moving multi-GB files back and forth. But you're never going to see it on this bit of kit, leading me to my conclusion that this port is included solely for the marketers.

Just take this from their product page...

Nonsense.

SgtRock

Indeed can't see the point of 10Gb, I wonder if the backplane could even handle 10Gb.

I'd be looking at rolling my own device with pfSense for that sort of money.

FaxFan2002

High end Asus motherboards come with the ad wifi, but at short range you might as well stick a cable between them...

gagaga

For most UK houses, a single AP on the ceiling of the hallway will get a signal to all rooms in the house with only 1 door/wall in the way.  If you can get a CAT 6 cable in place for ethernet/POE you can just swap out the AP every 4-5 years as the standards change.
I've done this on my past 3 houses with a single Ubiquiti AP and get 200mbps  everywhere.  They cost ~ £70 and you can get TP link equivalents for about £35 if you don't need the management functionality of the Unifi gear.

Goodmane

What brand access point do you use on the ceiling? I'd never seen one pretty enough to put on the ceiling...?

Mister_Tad

"Pretty" is a stretch, but Ubiquiti Unifi APs are mainly inoffensive.

However I've found no fewer than three of them are needed to reach every nook and cranny in the house.

gagaga

This is the basic one - they make a long range version and a HD version with the latest standards as well (i've got the LR plus an AC Pro)
UniFi AC Lite

You can turn off the light so it look like a slightly oversized smoke alarm (and certainly is less offensive to look at than most smoke alarms).

Guessing it's got walls a metre thick or lots of floors?  My place is 20m wide (1 story) and just one of them gives usable signal across the whole house, 2 gives strong signal everywhere (reasonable distance to the neighbours, so only see 2 other networks at the extreme ends of the house, no other networks in the middle).

bogart99

Should there be any difference at all in a speedtest result depending ones modem/router setup?
I though that was purely dependant on, in my case, two bits of wet string going off into the ether

Mister_Tad

Three floors, the odd block wall internally, the rest cavity walls stuffed with insulation - not an idea environment for RF, but then houses tend not to be. I have one per floor in a roughly central position. The top ceiling-mounted AP could make a decent run at going solo for most of the house, but would leave some areas with single-mbit speeds and others with drop-offs, so the other two are excellent at filling those, getting 5GHz into more areas and spreading the load.

mickevh

Oh yes:  

In no particular order and to pick a couple of random examples - If you choose modem that doesn't sync well with the one in the local exchange, if your modem doesn't cope with noise well, if you choose a router that doesn't have enough "routing capacity" (horsepower if you will) for the bandwidth required. One of the tests Tim at SmallNetBuilder does is to test the "WAN-to-LAN" routing capacity.

But unless you're a nerd determined to squeeze every drop of potential performance out of the kit, generally I'm a bit "zen" such things and if it's working well enough, I tend to not worry about it. Viz, my current laptop has a miserable 72mbps NIC in it when my AP can do 450mbps, but for day to day Internet surfing it's just fine, so I just get on with life instead of stressing about it.