For the 2.4GHz band, the antennas are 2 dbi. What is the gain for the antennas on the R8500? The main purposes of this design is to avoid noise from the main board from interfering with the Wi-Fi signal, and to increase power to achieve greater Wi-Fi performance and range. It improves both the Wi-Fi speed and range for Wi-Fi clients connected to the R8500. What is an active antenna and how does it benefit me?Īctive antennas are designed by NETGEAR. The four internal antennas inside the router are used for the second 5 GHz Wi-Fi radio. The four external antennas are used for one 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi radio and one 5 GHz Wi-Fi radio. The router has four external antennas and four internal antennas. The router is tri-band, which means that is has three Wi-Fi bands: one 2.4 GHz band and two 5 GHz bands. Yes, if Ethernet port 1 and Ethernet port 2 are not connected to an Ethernet port aggregation supported device, they act just like regular Ethernet ports. Can I connect regular Ethernet devices to these ports? I see that Ethernet port 1 and Ethernet port 2 on the rear panel of the router is labeled AGGREGATE. Ethernet port aggregation is also referred to as link aggregation, teaming port, and port trunking.
The router supports 802.3ad link aggregation protocol, and will improve the aggregation file download and upload speeds to over the 1G boundary. Your Wi-Fi client must support the MU-MIMO capability in order to receive the benefits of it.Įthernet port aggregation allows the router to combine Ethernet ports 1 and 2 for data transfer to a supporting device, such as a NAS. MU-MIMO can break this limitation and also be very useful for current popular Wi-Fi devices, like mobile devices and IoT devices. With the current technology, the router handles wireless packets one at a time, even with multiple Wi-Fi clients. MU-MIMO is a new Wi-Fi technology which allows multiple 1x1 or 2x2 clients to transmit and receive wireless packets at the same time. 4x4 Wi-Fi will also be very useful with MU-MIMO capability. However, the throughput improvement on your existing Wi-Fi client can be improved with newer Wi-Fi chipsets and the NETGEAR design active antennas. How can I get a higher throughput with this router?Īlthough the R8500 is a 4x4 Wi-Fi router, there are no 4x4 Wi-Fi clients available on the market yet. One of them is USB 3.R8500 is a 4x4 Wi-Fi router. Two of six Gigabit Ethernet ports can be aggregated to double the connection speed to a Network Attached Storage device for 4K HD streaming or fast backups of multiple WiFi devices simultaneously. Six Gigabit Ethernet LAN ports allow you to connect even more wired devices. This allows the router to receive cleaner and stronger signals from your mobile devices, avoiding signal degradation between the antennas and motherboard. These Active Antennas help improve WiFi performance by amplifying signal in the antenna itself. Netgear moved the WiFi amplifiers from their usual location, on the router's motherboard, to the top of the antennas. Dynamic QoS identifies your online activities by application and device, and then utilizes bandwidth allocation, and traffic prioritization techniques, to automatically allocate more bandwidth to latency sensitive applications like online gaming and video streaming, while ensuring that lower priority applications continue to work. Load balancing prevents overloading a single 5 GHz band and ensures that both the WiFi bands are utilized and device connections are spread across the two bands.ĭynamic QoS resolves Internet traffic congestion when you have competing Internet demands at home. The router uses load balancing to distribute WiFi connections among all three WiFi bands, to ensure that both the WiFi bands are utilized.
X8 uses Smart Connect to optimize WiFi performance by intelligently assigning every device to the fastest WiFi band possible and doing so allows devices to connect at their maximum speed. The Nighthawk X8 AC5300 Smart WiFi Router with Tri-Band WiFi technology delivers a combined wireless speed of up to 5.3Gbps (1000 + 2166 + 2166 Mbps).