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Forum Discussion
Axeldook
Oct 28, 2015Aspirant
AC5300 Nighthawk X8 Smart WiFi Router R8500 uk release date
Hi, Does anyone know when this router will be released in the UK please. thanks
- Nov 05, 2015
Possible release will be mid-December of this year.
Babylon5
Oct 28, 2015NETGEAR Employee Retired
Someone may come up with a quicker answer, but otherwise I will enquire later today when I get home from work, about 7 hours from now.
I was on the beta test for that router and have it set up as an AP right now (works perfectly well as a router also). My ISP is Virgin Media so the very impressive wireless throughput that the R8500 provides is very welcome.
Use with a compatible Link Aggregation NAS is also very impressive with transfer rates at the full gigabit rate over my very busy LAN, easily hitting a sustained 100Mbytes / second.
Axeldook
Oct 28, 2015Aspirant
thanks Andy,
I look forward to hearing from you.
The R8500 router has some impressive specs. Keen to upgrade from my R7000...
- Babylon5Oct 28, 2015NETGEAR Employee Retired
I do have quite a few routers, currently I’m running six concurrently (that’s about 15 different SSIDs), and that includes the R7000 which is one of my favourites.
I have found that the throughput and performance of the R8500 is noticeably higher than the R7000, and as I mentioned above the Link Aggregation feature is a must-have with a compatible NAS.
- AxeldookOct 28, 2015Aspirant
Sounds good (and a very compressive setup you have too!) My driver for upgrading to the R8500 is signal strength/range
Can you confirm (from your experience) what percentage the difference is between the R7000 and R8500 in turns of improvement. Are we in the reigns of 30%/40% increase in performance would you say?
thanks Andy
- Babylon5Oct 28, 2015NETGEAR Employee Retired
I posted some rough figures here;
https://community.netgear.com/t5/Nighthawk-WiFi-Routers/R8500/m-p/990076#M19241
For WiFi performance this was based on a one time test comparing against the R8000 in the same environment. A more scientific test would repeat this many times over a period of days or weeks, at different times of the day.
Still in my estimation I would say that in most cases the R8500 range was the same or slightly better, but at shorter in-range distances throughput was significantly better. This latter point could be important in situations where a WiFi extender is used as throughput via the extender to remote locations will also be improved. In my three bedroom house with all internal walls of brick construction, there are no dead spots with the R8500.