Netgear Nighthawk RS200: A very affordable, surprisingly speedy Wi-Fi 7 router

It’s the age of Wi-Fi 7 wireless routers: before the Netgear Nighthawk RS200 came the Netgear Nighthawk RS700S – the first Wi-Fi 7 router of 2024 with a princely launch price of £800. Some months later came the Nighthawk RS300, offering a more lightweight specification for a comparatively affordable £300.

Now the company has squeezed the price even further to produce the cheapest Wi-Fi 7 router we’ve seen to date. The Netgear Nighthawk RS200 looks and feels all but identical to the RS300, but uses a dual-band radio in place of the standard tri-band arrangement.

This means there’s less overall bandwidth to go around, but since the RS200 uses the same 5GHz radio as found in the top-tier RS700S router the result is very decent wireless performance.

Netgear Nighthawk RS200 Wi-Fi 7 router review: What you need to know

The Nighthawk RS200 is a Wi-Fi 7 router, promising wireless coverage of up to 186m² and enough processing power to support up to 80 client devices. That should be ample for a typical UK home.

The router provides a total of 6.5Gbits/sec of wireless bandwidth, comprising a 2.4GHz network with a maximum data rate of 700Mbits/sec and a 5GHz radio supporting connections at up to 5.8Gbits/sec with 4×4 MIMO.

The router doesn’t support Wi-Fi 7’s signature multi-link operation mode (MLO), either, although it probably wouldn’t add much in terms of speed anyway since there’s no 6GHz radio. And it also only supports a maximum channel width of 160MHz, rather than the 320MHz permitted by the Wi-Fi 7 specification. However, its use of Wi-Fi 7 protocols on the 5GHz band still gives it a performance advantage over Wi-Fi 6 routers.

The RS200 is well equipped for wired networking, too, with 2.5GbE WAN and LAN connections, plus a USB-A 3.0 socket (max 5Gbits/sec) for easy file sharing. While the standard feature set is fairly basic, it can be extended with Netgear’s Armor security service and the company’s own parental control platform – for an additional fee.

Netgear Nighthawk RS200 Wi-Fi 7 router review: Price and competition

This is the first Wi-Fi 7 router we’ve seen that really qualifies as a budget buy, but the next-step-up Nighthawk RS300 now costs around £30 less. That model adds a whole extra 6GHz radio, but there’s a trade-off: 5GHz performance is slower than on the RS200, as revealed by our tests below.

Above that, there are also Nighthawk RS500 and RS600 variants, offering progressively faster performance on the 5GHz and 6GHz bands for £400 and £500 respectively. At the top of the range sits the Netgear Nighthawk RS700S, which comes fully tricked out with 10GbE and a total of 19Gbits/sec of wireless bandwidth. It’s cheaper than it was when we first reviewed it, but still pricey at £700.

Alternatively, you could buy a single Amazon Eero Max 7 unit, which proved even faster in our tests than the Nighthawk RS700S, costs £100 less at £600 (although often less during sales periods) and can grow into a multi-node mesh system. At £600, though, it’s still in quite a different market to the Nighthawk RS200.

In fact, most competing routers priced at around the £200 mark are still using Wi-Fi 6 or Wi-Fi 6E. There’s nothing wrong with that: the Asus RT-AXE7800 is loaded with features and includes 6GHz networking for £225. Or, your needs might be perfectly well met by a standard Wi-Fi 6 router such as the £125 Asus RT-AX59U or the Linksys MR7350 – currently £100 on Amazon, but regularly discounted to as little as £50.

Netgear Nighthawk RS200 Wi-Fi 7 router review: Design and features

Netgear has evidently landed on a distinctive obelisk-style look for its Wi-Fi 7 routers, which in my view looks suitably futuristic yet still tasteful. This model is outwardly identical to the RS300, save for the arrangement of ports at the back; it also resembles the RS700 but is quite a bit smaller, standing 249mm tall and extending to 150mm wide.

Down the front of the unit is a string of status LEDs, plus little push-buttons for turning the Wi-Fi on and off, or disabling the lights for a low profile. At the rear you’ll find the 2.5Gbits/sec WAN and LAN ports and three regular gigabit LAN connectors; if your outboard gear doesn’t support 2.5GbE, you can also use 802.3ad link aggregation to combine two network sockets into a single 2Gbits/sec connection. I don’t love the vertically stacked ports, as this leads to your network cables to all hang down on top of one another, but I assume the upright design is for the benefit of the internal antennae.

There’s also a 5Gbits/sec USB socket, which you can use to share files on a flash drive or external disk over the LAN, stream them to a DLNA-compatible receiver and even publish them online via HTTP or FTP. There’s no support for other device types, though, such as printers or 5G mobile adapters.

If you’ve used a Netgear router in the past seven years, then you’ll know just what to expect from the setup and management. With the Nighthawk mobile app, I was able to scan a QR code sticker on the top of the router and get set up in just a few taps. You can then use the same app for everyday management tasks, such as turning the guest network on and off, changing your Wi-Fi passphrase or testing the connection strength and download speed around your home.

The familiar Netgear web portal provides access to more advanced controls, such as DHCP and port forwarding settings. You can also activate an OpenVPN server, allowing access to your home network over the internet.

It’s a fair set of capabilities, but Netgear doesn’t miss out on the upsell. When you first set up the router you’re invited to try out the Armor security service and Netgear’s parental controls for a trial period; after this, though, you’ll have to pay £85/yr to keep Armor going, plus £5/mth or £50/yr for the parental controls. This slightly undermines the low initial purchase price, especially since Asus routers offer comparable features for free.

Netgear Nighthawk RS200 Wi-Fi 7 router review: Performance

I tested the Nighthawk RS200’s wireless performance in my usual way. I hooked up an Asustor Drivestor Pro AS3304T NAS to the Nighthawk’s 2.5GbE socket, then carried a test laptop – equipped with an Intel BE200 2×2 Wi-Fi 7 card – around my home and measured upload and download speeds to and from the NAS in various parts of the house.

Before testing, I installed the latest router firmware, and also disabled Netgear’s “Smart Connect” feature, which combines all supported radio bands into a single SSID. This default setting keeps things simple, but it can lead to inconsistent performance if the connecting device tries to roam between the 2.4GHz and 5GHz networks. For testing purposes, therefore, I chose to split up the bands and connect explicitly to the 5GHz network.

One last important point to mention is that I’ve recently moved house, and the Nighthawk RS200 has the honour of being the first router I’ve tested in my new home. This means the Wi-Fi performance figures you’ll see below aren’t directly comparable to the speeds I’ve reported in past reviews of older routers. To provide some context, I’ve dug out and re-tested the Nighthawk RS300 and RS700 models in the new house, along with the Asus RT-AXE7800. Here are the results:

The Nighthawk RS200 acquitted itself better than you might expect, with consistently faster download speeds than the Asus router and Netgear’s own RS300. Indeed, its performance was almost precisely on par with the flagship RS700, save for a blip in the living room, which I’ll put down to the inherent randomness of Wi-Fi.

These results are easily explained by a quick look at the various routers’ respective specifications. The RS300 uses a cut-down 5GHz radio with a top connection speed of 2.9Gbits/sec, while the Asus’ use of Wi-Fi 6E limits its maximum transmission speed to 4.8Gbits/sec. The RS200 meanwhile features the same full-speed 5.8Gbits/sec transmitter as found in the RS700, and clearly reaps the benefits.

The counterpoint is that all of those other routers also include a separate 6GHz radio, which the RS200 lacks. However, this isn’t something you necessarily need for a home router – all Wi-Fi devices, present and future, will be able to connect on the standard 5GHz and 2.4GHz bands. And using the upper radio band doesn’t necessarily improve performance, as my tests showed:

Your eyes do not deceive you: on both the Asus and RS300 routers, switching to the 6GHz network actually resulted in slower download speeds. For the Asus, this is due to a relatively slow top connection speed of 2.4Gbits/sec on the 6GHz radio; the RS300 claims a maximum speed of 5.8Gbits/sec. In practice (owing to the lesser penetration of higher-frequency signals) this still yields a slower connection than the 5GHz radio in the RS200 running at the same nominal speed. Only the RS700 does better over a 6GHz connection, thanks to its ability to connect on the upper band at speeds up to 11.5Gbits/sec.

It’s worth noting that a future firmware update to the RS300 could boost its speeds by enabling Wi-Fi 7’s MLO feature, allowing the router to communicate with clients simultaneously across the 5GHz and 6GHz networks. However, there’s no word on when or whether such an update will be released, and our initial tests with MLO-capable hardware have shown only small performance benefits.

Netgear Nighthawk RS200 Wi-Fi 7 router review: Verdict

The Nighthawk RS200 is a surprisingly nippy little router. Based on our results, it should give you a better wireless experience than competing mid-market Wi-Fi 6E and Wi-Fi 7 routers, for a lower price.

Clearly, it’s short on future-proofing. The inclusion of multi-gigabit Ethernet is great for wired connections, but with no 6GHz radio, no 320MHz channel width support and no MLO, the RS200 may struggle to realise the full potential of upcoming Wi-Fi 7 devices. Then again, in truth, it’s hard to see how a typical household will notice or care about that any time soon.

Indeed, my biggest reservation about the RS200 is that for most people it’s actually overkill. After all, 4K video streaming, Zoom calls and live online gaming only need around 4MB/sec of bandwidth; you can get that from a much cheaper Wi-Fi 6 router, such as the Linksys MR7350.

Without a doubt though, there’s a market for the RS200. If you want something fast enough to fling large files around your home network at high speeds, without having to pay for multi-band connections and high-end features, the Netgear Nighthawk RS200 hits a very appealing sweet spot.