Setting up a new Wi-Fi router used to fill me with dread. The idea of pulling all the cables out, rummaging behind the sofa, finding the extremely poorly placed power socket, and then going through the rigmarole of changing every single item in our house over to a new network with increasingly difficult to enter passwords used to rank amongst the worst tasks in modern life.
Thankfully, networking companies have realised they can make things easier for you, while also putting out some of the fastest, most cutting-edge Wi-Fi tech around. It’s clear that Netgear have put serious thought into their brand-new Nighthawk range of Wi-Fi 7 routers, and, after a simple onboarding process, your home’s internet will be ripping along faster than ever before.
In the box, you’re getting the top-of-the-range Nighthawk RS700 router, a power brick with both UK and US attachments, and a standard 2m ethernet cable for connecting to your incoming cable or fibre internet doodah. As you’re pulling everything out of the box, the immediate thing you’re going to notice is how big and imposing the Nighthawk router actually is. It’s a chonky, wedge-shaped beast, with silver metal venting at the top and gloss finish on the LED displays that gives it a real Cyberpunk feel.
In the grand scheme of things, it’s not that big a step away from the back plastics and glowing LEDs of the BT, Virgin, EE and other routers that are sat in most of the homes in the UK, but if you’re moving from something like the dinky and understated white boxes of an Eero setup, you’re certain to notice a change in aesthetics.
The Nighthawk RS700S is heavy. If it’s going to sit in a hallway, in danger of being knocked by flailing coats and grasping children’s hands, you might want to make sure it can’t fall off the side of a table and put a dent into your flooring. That weight does mean it’s fairly settled in place, but its tower-like design means that it’s not completely safe from toppling over.
You begin setup via the Nighthawk app, with some nice, streamlined QR codes pointing you towards the app on either iOS or Android. From there, the cabling experience is similarly straightforward, with a 10Gbps socket for your incoming connection or fibre internet signal, and then five ports for your home network – four at Gigabit speeds, and one at 10Gbps.
There’s also a USB-A 3.0 port for connecting a storage device, which you can then use via Readyshare, which is a really handy inclusion in multi-platform households or workplaces. You can access this drive remotely as a pretty literal interpretation of Network Attached Storage, and if you’re looking for a router that can truly sit at the centre of your home network setup, the Nighthawk makes it as easy as possible. That said, I’d have liked to have seen a USB-C port here as well in 2025.
The Nighthawk app talks you through connecting everything, and it also gives you the option of immediately swapping out the network ID and password, so you can easily just fill in the details of your old network and avoid some of the annoyance of reprogramming everything. I say ‘some’ of the annoyance, as a few of our devices still required me to reconfirm the details, while our LG TV made me completely reconnect. Whether that’s down to the shift from WiFi 6 to WiFi 7, a change in bands the device is connecting to, or a switch to a newer password security protocol, I’m not sure, but it was only a minor bump in the road, and still much faster than a wholesale change.
It’s little surprise to find that the Nighthawk made a clear and perceptible change to the WiFi connection and internet speed in the house. While our previous Eero setup was, on average, providing 715Mbps of download speed, the Nighthawk RS700s provided closer to 1Gbps on our individual devices through most of our testing time. It boasts a combined potential speed of 19Gbps across all its bands, though that’s admittedly a purely theoretical figure, combining 2.4Ghz, 5Ghz and 6Ghz bands, very wide spectrum usage (which might be impractical in a busy environment), and accommodating many devices in use at the same time.
It’s also got three times the capacity, allowing connections to up to 200 devices. Even our, incredibly tech-heavy house doesn’t come close to touching that, but in a workplace or office setting, that’s a real selling point, and we ran multiple multiplayer gaming, streaming and chatting sessions, with everything feeling ridiculously snappy and fast.
I’ve also been testing GeForce Now across a number of devices, and the Nighthawk RS700S allowed for a seamless streaming experience over WiFi, while our previous WiFi 6 Eero setup had, at times, struggled to do it justice. Chomping my way through the incredible Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, its timing-heavy combat was still on point, and, unbelievably, I never felt at a disadvantage while playing via streaming. I’ve spent a great deal of time playing over streaming services like Stadia and Microsoft’s Cloud Streaming, and the Nighthawk RS700S brought more stability than ever before. Admittedly, that is as you’d hope, with the WiFi 7 protocol able to halve the latency of WiFi 6. Still, it absolutely played out during our real-world testing.
Range then, is perhaps the final question mark, and the Nighthawk RS700S is capable of 3500 square feet (325 square metres) of coverage. That doesn’t account for walls and ceilings getting in the way and attenuating signal, but through our three-storey townhouse, with the router on the ground floor, I still received a 100% signal on the top floor, albeit with a reduced 512Mbps speed. That’s still excellent, and for most home settings, I think a single Nighthawk router will suffice. If you need even wider coverage, you might want to look at a mesh system rather than a sole router, or a WiFi extender, but these have their own limitations, and can cause you interference rather than improving your internet experience.
At £550 RRP, the Nighthawk RS700S is an extremely expensive addition to your home network setup, but it’s one that has clear and immediate benefits, especially if you’re bringing the latest WiFi 7-equipped tech into your house like the iPhone 17, Honor Magic V5 or the PlayStation 5 Pro. It’s likely only going to truly appeal to those on the cutting edge, but with its ease of setup, comprehensive app support and tangible results, the Nighthawk RS700S is a winning combination, especially in gaming-centric homes.