Netgear Nighthawk RS300 Wi-Fi 7 router review: Next-gen wireless at the lowest price yet

We’ve reviewed a few Wi-Fi 7 routers this year, but I was particularly excited to try out the Netgear Nighthawk RS300. This isn’t because it’s faster or more feature-packed than the competition – it’s not – but because it’s the first Wi-Fi 7 wireless router we’ve seen at a price that might conceivably make sense for a typical household.

Indeed, while the RS300 doesn’t match the specifications of the top-of-the-line Netgear Nighthawk RS700S, in our tests it proved to be a speedy and powerful router in its own right.

Even so, we’re still not seeing the expected advantages of Wi-Fi 7. Speed and reliability improvements might be enabled by future driver or firmware updates, but the new wireless standard isn’t yet delivering significant benefits over far cheaper Wi-Fi 6 options – which makes it hard to recommend buying the RS300 for now.

Netgear Nighthawk RS300 Wi-Fi 7 router review: What you need to know

The RS300 is a standalone wireless router, designed to work with an existing internet connection, so you might need to pair it with a separate modem or cable box. Netgear claims it’s suitable for homes of up to 185m2, with up to 100 client devices connected, meaning it should be fine for most UK households.

Like all Wi-Fi 7 routers, it’s a tri-band design, broadcasting simultaneously on the 2.4GHz, 5GHz and 6GHz frequency bands. However, where Netgear’s premium RS700S uses 4×4 MIMO on each band, this model uses 2×2 antenna arrays, with theoretical peak speeds of 700Mbits/sec, 2.9Gbits/sec and 5.8Gbits/sec respectively across the three radios.

The RS300 also has a pair of 2.5GbE LAN connectors, for high-speed wired devices, plus two standard gigabit Ethernet ports and a single 5Gbits/sec USB connector, allowing for easy storage sharing over a network.

Netgear Nighthawk RS300 Wi-Fi 7 router review: Price and competition

While you can’t exactly call it cheap, the Nighthawk RS300 is the most affordable Wi-Fi 7 router we’ve seen. The Nighthawk RS700S is more than twice the price at £900, while Amazon’s Eero Max 7 system costs £600 for a single router unit or £1,700 for a three-unit mesh.

If you’re on a budget, therefore, the Nighthawk RS300 may look like a persuasive option – especially since, as we’ll see in our tests below, its top speeds are perfectly on par with its pricier rivals.

 The catch is that, as things currently stand, it’s barely any faster than a decent Wi-Fi 6E router. That may change with future updates, but if you’re looking for top-tier performance right now, you’d probably be perfectly happy with the Netgear Nighthawk RAXE300 for a mere £250, or the feature-packed Asus RT-AXE7800 for just £202.

 Alternatively, if you’re focused on ease of use, the Synology RT-AX6600ax certainly deserves a look. This formidable router doesn’t support the 6GHz band, and at £309 it’s actually slightly pricier than the Nighthawk RS300 – but it’s still extremely fast, with a tri-band radio configuration that helps you manage and segment your traffic, and its mouse-driven administration interface is intuitive and powerful.

Or, if you don’t need the bells and whistles and just want usable Wi-Fi for a sensible price, consider a regular Wi-Fi 6 router like the Asus RT-AX59U, which will meet your needs for just £123. 

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Netgear Nighthawk RS300 Wi-Fi 7 router review: Design and features

The Nighthawk RS300 is a slightly cut-down variant of the RS700S, in terms of both Wi-Fi technology and physical design. Like its bigger brother, it’s an black angular tower, in this case standing 249mm tall – around 33mm shorter than the RS700S – with a maximum footprint of 150 x 102mm.

Down the front shine a row of white LEDs showing LAN, USB and Wi-Fi activity, above a physical button for WPS pairing and another that toggles the LEDs off, for those who prefer the Disaster Area stunt ship aesthetic.

At the back, while the RS300 doesn’t match the 10GbE support of the RS700S, you still get multi-gig Ethernet both upstream and downstream, via a 2.5GbE internet socket and twin 2.5GbE LAN ports. The other two LAN sockets are rated at regular gigabit speeds, but can be combined using 802.3ad link aggregation, to give a performance boost to a compatible NAS device.

Tucked between the WAN and LAN connectors there’s also a USB-A connector, for shared storage. It’s a shame that this socket is only rated at 5Gbits/sec, as there are plenty of USB SSDs that would be able to deliver higher speeds over a fast Ethernet or Wi-Fi connection, but you can’t have everything.

 Setup is handled quite slickly by the Netgear Nighthawk mobile app. Once you’ve scanned the QR code sticker on the router to identify and connect to it, all you need to do is set your wireless and administrative passwords. I found I then had to wait through an automated reboot, a firmware update and a further reboot, but almost no additional interaction was required and my new Nighthawk network was up and running in under ten minutes.

The same app is used for ongoing administration. After logging in (with either your password or a handy thumbprint), the app dashboard lets you do basic things like browsing connected devices, turning the guest network on and off and checking your network speed. The integrated Wi-Fi analytics tool is useful, too, showing a live scan of signal strength and other nearby networks, to help you find the best location and Wi-Fi channel for your router.

If you want to switch to a different channel, however, or configure features such as port forwarding and IP address reservation, you’ll need to open up a web browser and use Netgear’s traditional web administration interface. This feels a bit clunky and old fashioned, but it offers many more settings than the app. On the web, you can share your USB storage, either locally or over the internet, and enable an inbound VPN server to securely access your home network over the internet, with the convenience of dynamic DNS addressing. Like all Netgear routers, however, the RS300 won’t natively work with third-party VPN servers to anonymise your online activity.

The Nighthawk RS300 does support Netgear’s Armor security service and its parental control platform, but these are included only as 30-day trials, after which you’ll have to pay to keep them both going. Armor costs £85 per year, while parental controls are £5/mth or £50 a year. That’s a big ask considering that Asus and TP-Link routers bundle basic security and parental controls for free, in fairness though, Netgear’s package does include Bitdefender antivirus and VPN software for all your devices.

Netgear Nighthawk RS300 Wi-Fi 7 router review: Performance

I tested the performance of the Nighthawk RS300 with my usual test laptop, now equipped with an Intel BE200 2×2 Wi-Fi 7 card. This card supports the 320MHz channel width introduced with Wi-Fi 7 to deliver maximum bandwidth on the 6GHz channel, and with the latest driver it also supports Wi-Fi 7’s signature MLO (multi-link operation) feature, which allows individual devices to communicate across multiple radio bands at once, for a faster and more stable connection.

Unfortunately, the RS300 doesn’t currently support MLO. If you leave it in its default “Smart Connect” mode, it will present the 2.4GHz, 5GHz and 6GHz bands all as a single combined network, and will even shunt connected clients across bands to help them maintain a decent signal – but data connections will only use one channel at a time.

This isn’t a disaster. As we’ve previously seen with Wi-Fi 6 and 6E, you can get very fast file transfers over a single 5GHz or 6GHz connection. Nor is it a surprise, since none of the Wi-Fi 7 routers or meshes we’ve previously tested has supported MLO. It is however starting to become a frustration: past systems have had the excuse of being early-adopter devices running first-generation firmware, but today, when you can walk into Currys and grab a Wi-Fi 7 laptop off the shelf, this incomplete implementation is a lot harder to excuse.

Netgear says it’s working on a software update to add MLO support, but it won’t make any promises as to when this might appear – so for now we can only assess the RS300 as it currently operates.

I did this by connecting an Asustor Drivestor Pro AS3304T NAS to one of the router’s 2.5GbE ports, and using my test laptop to connect to the wireless network over Wi-Fi 7. To get a clear picture of the RS300’s capabilities, I turned off “Smart Connect” mode and tested the 5GHz and 6GHz radios independently; in each case I took the laptop to various areas of my home, tried copying a series of 100MB test files to and from the NAS, and measured upload and download speeds in different locations.

Here’s how the results stack up, along with those from routers we’ve previously tested for comparison:

As you can see, the Nighthawk RS300’s top speeds on the 6GHz band are up there with the best – which is great news if you’re looking for Wi-Fi 7 on a budget. However, since the pricier RS700S supports 4×4 MIMO, you can expect it to provide more aggregate bandwidth when multiple devices are communicating at once.

 The RS300 is also less impressive on the 5GHz band. As we’ve noted, this network is only rated at half the speed of the 6GHz one, and I found the difference in performance was palpable. Both the Nighthawk RS700S and the Amazon Eero Max 7 provided considerably faster 5GHz service in most locations, the notable exception being a blip in the study from the RS700S.

Finally, the Nighthawk RS300’s smaller overall design affects its performance at range. In the bathroom at the far end of my home, the RS700S’ download speeds were around 50% faster than the RS300’s on both the 5GHz and 6GHz bands. And when I tried the RS300 in its default Smart Connect mode, my test laptop fell back onto the 2.4GHz network in this location, resulting in a sluggish download speed of just 3.5MB/sec.

While the RS300 clearly isn’t as powerful as the priciest Wi-Fi 7 routers, it still has enough bandwidth to satisfy all but exceptionally demanding homes. The real catch is that, in the absence of MLO, it offers no real performance advantage over a high-end Wi-Fi 6E router. Netgear’s older RAXE300 more or less matched the RS300’s overall download speeds, with the Asus RT-AXE7800 close enough behind that you wouldn’t notice a difference in everyday use. Indeed, the Wi-Fi 6-only Synology delivered very similar transfer speeds on its high-band 5GHz network.

Netgear Nighthawk RS300 Wi-Fi 7 router review: Verdict

The Netgear Nighthawk RS300 smashes the Wi-Fi 7 price barrier, yet it’s still hard to get excited about. In its present state, it’s really no faster than a Wi-Fi 6 router, and while that could change with a firmware update, there’s no way of knowing how big the benefits of MLO will be, or how soon they will arrive.

Thus we find ourselves stuck in the same sad position we’ve been in since the start of the year. If you need a new router today you might reasonably choose the RS300 on the basis that it’s at least as fast as competing Wi-Fi 6 routers, and it will hopefully get faster at some point in the future, whereas those last-generation models definitely won’t.

At the same time, you can save a decent chunk of money by sticking with Wi-Fi 6 – and if you go for a decently equipped model such as the Asus RT-AXE7800 you can also enjoy a much broader range of software features. Until Netgear commits to a timeline for adding the multi-band capabilities that are supposed to be a headline feature of Wi-Fi 7, the Nighthawk RS300 feels more like a leap of faith than a smart investment.