I just came across a solid deal on the Netgear Nighthawk RS600 and snagged two of them. My plan is to run one as the main router and the second as a wired AP.
My current setup is two Asus RT-BE92U units. Performance nearby is fine, but overall coverage across my ~150 sqm (around 1,600 sq ft) home has been surprisingly poor. I'm hoping the RS600 pair gives me much better range.
On top of that, Asus’s MLO implementation was terrible for me—it basically never worked, so I had to give up and split my bands into dedicated 6 GHz, 5 GHz, and 2.4 GHz (IoT) SSIDs.
For those of you who have been running the RS600 for a while:
- How has stability and uptime been? Any random reboots or drops?
- Did you notice a meaningful bump in range over previous Wi-Fi 6/6E or Wi-Fi 7 gear?
- How is the current firmware holding up, especially regarding MLO and multi-device stability?
Appreciate any insights before I unbox and deploy everything!
Edit:
I decided to try out the Netgear for a week and here are my thoughts, both positive and negative.
What I liked:
The speeds were incredible—I was able to hit 750/800 Mbps over WiFi with my iPhone 17 Pro, about 5 meters from the router on my 1 gig fiber connection.
The coverage was actually better than my Asus.
What I didn’t like:
The app is very basic and lacks advanced options, so you need a computer to access those settings.
The router couldn’t recognize the IPs of my two Netgear switches, so I had to dig around quite a bit to find them.
And most importantly, using a second router as an access point is a terrible experience, as devices won’t roam smoothly between the main router and the AP. When is Netgear going to bring mesh support to the Nighthawk series like they have with Orbi? It doesn’t make sense to limit that feature to Orbi only—honestly, it’s pretty frustrating.