NETGEAR Nighthawk RS500 Review

I can’t say I was floored or disappointed by the Nighthawk RS500’s speeds. It performed as expected, although due to its design, it couldn’t keep up in top speed with the other Wi-Fi 7 routers I tested.

For starters, a single Wi-Fi 7 smartphone (client) usually sees real-world speeds of around 3,700Mbps at close range, even though it’s designed for 5,764Mbps maximum. Plus, I can go outside to my marker across the street and record speeds of around 900Mbps using the same device.

What’s interesting here is that the 2.5Gbps internet port clearly bottlenecks the starting speeds on the RS500. However, it levels out with all the other Wi-Fi 7 routers I’ve tested when I run my benchmarks from across the street (120 feet from the router).

As the chart above shows, there’s nothing really notable to report about the 5 GHz testing, other than I switched to DFS channels to get the best speeds, given neighboring networks were hogging the lower and upper channel groups. Wi-Fi 7 routers have enabled me to use these channels to squeeze all the speed I can out of the 5 GHz band, something that wasn’t possible with Wi-Fi 6E and older routers.

Again, there’s nothing notable to see here. The router used channel 8 with a forced 40 MHz channel width, allowing me to get great speeds at close range. The RS200 model clearly shows you can get superfast real-world speeds, but I’ve mostly seen Wi-Fi 7 routers top out in the 400Mbps range when I run benchmarks at close range, and the RS500 is no different.

Compared to the competition, the RS500 is about as bare-bones as you can get. It includes an OpenVPN server, a media server, and file sharing. That’s it. There’s no built-in VPN client, no gaming tools, no backup internet support, and no mesh connectivity.

What the RS500 could do better

• Parental controls
• More free security tools

On the parental controls front, you can create and block profiles for free—yet you can create those for any user, not just children. Real parental control features, like bedtimes and content filtering, require a subscription.

Meanwhile, the router includes what’s called the Protection Engine, which safeguards your home network against DDoS attacks, brute force attacks, and more. It’s a feature you can toggle off if it bottlenecks your speed. However, perks like device-level antivirus protection and ad-blocking require a subscription.

The RS500 provides lots of wireless bandwidth across all three connections, but the 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet port used for the internet is a bottleneck. Sure, installing this port versus a 10Gbps one cuts down the price, but all the extra Wi-Fi bandwidth the port doesn’t support is a waste unless you’re tossing files between two Wi-Fi devices.

Meanwhile, the design includes a 2.5Gbps LAN connection and link aggregation support, the latter of which can be useful if you have a modem or a wired device (like a NAS) that supports link aggregation and doesn’t have a 2.5Gbps (or faster) port. There’s no mention of Wi-Fi 7’s Multi-Link Operation in the firmware or product page.

So, tell me if this makes sense. NETGEAR wants you to use the Nighthawk app, and since you’re setting up the home network for the first time, you must download it using a cellular connection. Once you install and open the app, you connect to the router’s Wi-Fi, but you absolutely must have a NETGEAR account to proceed. You can’t create the account using Wi-Fi because the router isn’t set up and is blocking your internet access. That means you disconnect, set up the NETGEAR account using cellular, and then start over. We shouldn’t need a cloud account to set up and manage the router locally.

You can bypass the cloud account nonsense by using the web UI method. It’s an annoyingly long process of:

• Detecting and acknowledging the internet connection
• Setting up security Q&As
• Updating the firmware (which you need to do anyway, but it can wait)
• Hitting a NETGEAR account setup roadblock disguised as product registration.

You can bypass the latter simply by reentering the web UI address.

After the easy breezy setups I experienced with the ASUS and TP-Link routers, NETGEAR’s approach feels a little offensive. Forcing cloud accounts when they’re not needed for local management seems more like data collection than convenience. People just want to get their home network up and running quickly, and will gladly get into the finer details like product registration and better security once they’re online.

NETGEAR uses the same web UI design on nearly every standalone router it produces. It’s divided into Basic and Advanced tabs and does a decent job in presenting every setting. I normally don’t have anything negative to say, but honestly, it uses a lot of white space, and that annoys me.

On a 4K desktop monitor with Chrome filling the screen and zoomed in at 125%, the Home screen doesn’t scale accordingly, so you have six little boxes in a sea of white—the design isn’t quite so drastic on a 1080p display. Reducing the Chrome window size tightens things up, depending on the size reduction.

I didn’t look at the web UI on mobile. Instead, I relied on the Nighthawk app, which has a better, more streamlined tile-based design. It serves your basic network management needs and plays home to some of the premium parental control and security features. However, hardcore things like changing Wi-Fi channels and setting up the OpenVPN server require a trip to the prehistoric web UI.