WiFi 7 brings with it more speed and a bigger range for heftier dollars, but if you prefer one over the other, there may be a bit of a compromise.
We don’t often think about upgrading our WiFi, but when we do, the jumps between generations can be really significant.
If you’ve upgraded your phone in the past few years but not your WiFi, there’s a good chance that using your phone at home means dealing with a slightly slower connection, thanks in part to older WiFi technology.
Not just the device that keeps your home wirelessly linked to the internet, the technologies underpinning WiFi improve with each subsequent generation, and if you’re using something older, you may be missing out.
The downside of newer WiFi technologies is two-fold: installing a new wireless network is often a pain in the proverbial, and expensive, to boot. As it is, WiFi 7 started around the $4K mark when it first arrived, putting it out of reach of most people.
But that is beginning to change, and in recent months, the benefits of WiFi 7 have come to more people as the price has fallen, usually with a compromise here and there. As the cost falls, so too does the speed and the amount of bandwidth on offer, saving you a few bucks with a caveat or two.
That’s what we saw with last year’s Netgear RS600, and it appears we’ll see a variation on that theme this year, too, as the Netgear Nighthawk RS100 aims to keep the momentum going.
The latest WiFi 7 router from Netgear cuts the bandwidth and speed down in a pretty serious way. While the RS600 offered 18Gbps of speed and bandwidth over three bands, the RS100 offers closer to a quarter of that with two bands.
There’s less speed and less bandwidth, and also less range, too, covering up to 185 square metres over a 2.4GHz and 5GHz band, missing out on the extra 6GHz commonly associated with WiFi 7.
But Netgear does have one thing going for the RS100: price.
Available in Australia for $259, the Nighthawk RS100 is just about the least expensive WiFi 7 router we’ve heard of, even if it’s not that fast, at least compared with the number of other WiFi 7 routers Netgear makes. It is available now, however, found at retailers across the country.
