![]() In short, the AX3600 mesh kit performed poorly in a congested environment, and the QoS did not effectively manage the congestion. Turning on the QoS did nothing for us-in fact the FPS went even lower to 20.2, and the dropped frames on the video stream went even higher to 34.8%, for an overall worse performance. We also had the latency rise to 189 ms, with a dropped frame rate on our streaming videos of 16.2%, plus six PingPlotter spikes. However, when we added in the ten 8K streaming videos, we saw the frame rate drop to 36.0 FPS, and at points the game froze with a frame rate of zero. When connected via the Ethernet cable, the frame rate of 119.8 was solid, with a low in-game latency of 69 ms. Stress testing the AX3600 mesh kit proved to be an exercise in disappointment, with a nearly nonexistent QoS that resulted in low frame rates on our game of Overwatch, and a high percentage of dropped frames. Our testing was done with our standard Asus gaming laptop, model G512L, which also uses the same AX201 card, although did not have any connection issues. We did discover that this was not the latest Intel driver for this card, which was subsequently upgraded to 22.60.0.6, but this didn’t solve the problem. An Acer Aspire laptop we had with a Wi-Fi 6 card (AX201, driver version 22.40.0.7) was completely unable to connect to the router. Right off the bat, we experienced connection issues. Purchasers should factor this into the cost of the AX3600, because some competing products have network-level antivirus for the life of the product without an additional cost. Beyond that, you’re looking at an annual subscription for an additional cost of $69.99 (although it’s currently on sale for less). But while there is a free trial, it’s limited to 30 days, even on this top end mesh kit. The AX3600 does support network level antimalware security, which is termed “Netgear Armor” here. The list is lengthy, and covers MU-MIMO for simultaneous data streaming, explicit beamforming on both the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz frequencies, OFDMA for both uplink and downlink and seven-stream WiFi for 4K video streaming. Also, it is unclear if one of these is the backhaul between the router and a satellite, which would then be a bottleneck to the faster 5 GHz speed, unless directly connected to the router.Īt least on paper, the AX3600 does have all of the wireless features that you would expect from a higher end piece of home networking gear-the three-piece kit we tested currently sells for just under $400. This sums up to 3600 Mbps of theoretical bandwidth, hence the name of this kit, however it strikes us as odd to have two different bandwidths for the 5 GHz radios. The wireless is tri-band, that is Wi-Fi 6 AX3600 ( Mbps + Mbps + 2.4 GHz 600Mbps). Specificationsīoth the router and the satellite units use a 1.5 GHz quad-core processor, and the router has 256 MB of flash memory for storage and 512 MB of RAM. Unfortunately, the light cannot be turned off, making this less than ideal for a bedroom application (unless you want to put a piece of black electrical tape over the LED). There is a single LED that glows blue when connected, flashes white when booting, and orange when ready to sync. While there are no external antennas, each unit has five internal antennas. But purist considerations aside, this setup promises to cover 6,750 square feet of wireless goodness with Wi-Fi 6 speeds. ![]() It consists of three pieces: a router and two satellites, which technically makes it a ‘Hub and spoke’ system rather than the ‘True mesh’ which has all identical wireless nodes. ![]() That’s what we’re looking at with the Netgear Nighthawk Mesh Wi-Fi 6 AX3600 (MK83) system. With a mesh kit, the manufacturer has done the heavy lifting, put multiple wireless units in one nice box that are all compatible and designed to work together out of the box,with a single set of directions to get it all up and running. But rather than going crazy trying to get all this gear to play well together, which can be a time sink even for a network expert and a significant challenge for novices, a simpler solution these days (though it’s often far from cheap) is a mesh networking kit. There is no shortage of wireless accessories to fix dead spots, including wireless extenders and powerline networks with wireless access points to get the signal where it needs to go. ![]()
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