AC5300 Nighthawk X8 Smart WiFi Router R8500 uk release date

[Axeldook]

Hi, 

Does anyone know when this router will be released in the UK please. 

thanks

[ElaineM · Accepted solution]

Possible release will be mid-December of this year.

[Babylon5]

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]

thanks Andy, 

I look forward to hearing from you.

The R8500 router has some impressive specs. Keen to upgrade from my R7000...

[Babylon5]

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.

[Axeldook]

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

[Babylon5]

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.

[Axeldook]

"In my three bedroom house with all internal walls of brick construction, there are no dead spots with the R8500" is exactly what i wanted to hear. 

I don't have any extenders in the house at the minute. The signal can drop to 1 bar (on my iphone6 / ipad air2) when im up stairs.

I'm hoping the R8500 will give a much better signal performance.

Don't forget to look at when it will be on sale in the uk for me !!

thanks Andy 

[ElaineM · Accepted solution]

Possible release will be mid-December of this year.