For the past few years, whenever you bought a wireless modem, router, or dongle, you wanted the letter “n”. Now, we’re stepping it up a notch and moving it to two letters, and Netgear wants to be among the first to get you there.
Set to launch in Australia in the next couple of weeks, Netgear’s R6300 WiFi router is one of the first in the country to offer the new 802.11ac standard, a wireless technology only announced in January at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
The technology pushes wireless devices even further, allowing speeds with other 802.11ac devices of up to 1.3Gbps on the 5GHz spectrum and up to 450Mbps on the 2.4GHz spectrum.
It’s also backwards compatible with pretty much every WiFi device you’ve ever bought, supporting 802.11a/b/g/n devices out of the box.
“After 15 years as an industry leader, we are thrilled to bring the first 802.11ac router to Australian consumers,” said Netgear’s Brad Little, Senior Director of Consumer Channels for the company’s Australia and Zealand division. “Offering the world’s fastest WiFi technology, 802.11ac is set to revolutionise the way we consume content wirelessly.”
While we’ve yet to see it in action, the early reports from CES indicated that while the speed improves dramatically in 802.11ac, the wireless connectivity also pushes out over a slightly longer distance while also proving to be up to six times more power efficient.
Netgear’s first foray in the 802.11ac space sadly doesn’t have a price yet, but with 802.11ac dongles for laptops out from the company in the next month or two, we’re sure we’ll find out what it will cost soon.
