The R6020 AC750 wireless router promises 750Mbps speeds and can only deliver a maximum of 100Mbps due to it's cheaped out ethernet ports which are limited to 100Mbps FE (a technology that was blistering fast in 1999 and before and has since died a long time ago).
I bought this router to boost the poor wifi coverage of our telco provided router (and the fact that it was stuck in a room near it's demarcation point, a poor corner to deliver good wifi signal everywhere). The R6020 was supposed to sit bang in the middle of the apartment with a gigabit cable connected to be able to give all 750Mbps (433 solely on the 5GHz channel) to it's clients, and if not that well at least 200 or 300Mpbs.
I connected the NetGear to our telco box throught it's WAN port and it configured itself without an issue and upgraded it's firmware pretty rapidly. When the wifi network was up and running and the telco one disabled for removing unecessary interference, speedtest showed me no more than 90Mbps download speeds over 10/15 tests through the NetGear. I didn't understand. According to my MacBook Pro I was connected at 867Mbps AC speeds and was right beside the box so why was I limited to 100Mbps. Our telco wifi, which was usually awful, was much better than this often showing speeds higher than 380/400Mbps right beside the unit.
I looked into the telco's config page and the LAN status showed me the NetGear was connected at 100Mbps which I thought was a ridiculous mistake and must be a forced setting. But even connecting to the LAN ports of the NetGear it was the same story and there was no negotiation config to change this to 1Gbps anywhere (I should point out that the telco box was capable of 1Gbps, a test with a Windows laptop confirmed this).
So these NetGear boxes are basically cable capped at 100Mbps no matter what you do. The only use case for 433Mbps (theoretical max for 5Ghz on this unit) is local connectivity - one laptop talking to another on the same Wifi network (and that will cut in half due to the half-duplex wifi connection). That's not the intended use case for the VAST majority of buyers who buy this router for improving their Wifi connection to the internet (why else would it have the blue WAN port).
NetGear, this is truly despicably false advertising and thankfully I have a 14 day return period to bring it back and get my money back, which is exactly what I intend to do. When your reason for existing is network gear, why stunt it and give it a bad name?
I'd agree that gigabit should be the baseline. But sadly it isn't.
All the major manufacturers have at least 1 device thats still 100mbps port speed. And they tend to have the 1000/1200mbps wireless ratings that are aggregate. Its a industry wide issue.
here's a few and this was just with a quick search
so as much as I think it'd be a great idea to be the new baseline, there is still a need for 10/100mbps devices and so that niche will be filled by device makers.
I'm glad you can return it to buy a new devices but make sure you're looking at the actual specs. I'd even encourage you to read a few reviews on places like smallnetbuilder for actual tested performance on them. Its a much better idea than trusting the boxes.
