The biggest upgrade to Wi-Fi technology in decades doesn’t come cheap.
Tied to the virtual CES conference, Netgear on Monday introduced one of the first routers built around the new Wi-Fi 6E standard, the tri-band enabled Nighthawk RAXE500.
Price: $599.
Also Read: Wi-Fi Gets Its Biggest Upgrade in Decades
Introduced in 2019, Wi-Fi 6 represented a major evolution in the way routers communicated with devices, making signal exchanges much more efficient. The just-introduced Wi-Fi 6E standard (the “E” standing for “extended”) uses an additional 1,200 MHz of unlicensed spectrum recently freed up by the FCC.
As more people communicate with more devices than ever in densely crowded areas, the additional spectrum is crucial for keeping signals from bumping into one another.
As the “tri-band” capability suggests, the RAXE500 supports the traditional 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands, in addition to 6 GHz.
It has five gigabit ports and two USB 3.0 ports, and contains a quad-core 1.8 GHz processor.
