Netgear announces a pair of 802.11ax AX6000 routers-- the 8-stream Nighthawk RAX80 and the 12-stream RAX120, both using the 2.4 and 5GHz bands and support for OFDMA (orthogonal frequency-division multiple access) on the uplink and downlink.
The RAX80 is based on the Broadcom BCM49408 SoC. It features two 802.11ax radios together with a 1.8GHz quad-core ARMv8 processor and an 800MHz network packet co-processor. The radios are in a 4x4:4 configuration, with one handling 2.4GHz duties (bgn+ax, with 40 MHz channels for 1150 Mbps of theoretical throughput), and the other the 5GHz channel (an+ac+ax, with 160 MHz channel support for 4800 Mbps of theoretical throughput).
Meanwhile the RAX120 AX6000 is based on the Qualcomm IPQ8078 SoC, with a quad-core Cortex A53 cluster running at 2.2GHz. It features two 802.11ax radios, he QCN5154 (an+ac+ax) and the QCN5124 (bgn+ax) for the 5 GHz and 2.4 GHz channels, set at 8x8:8 and 4x4:4 configuration respectively. The SoC also includes an integrated NBASE-T MAC, enabling a 5Gbps ethernet port.
Customers with internet speeds higher than 1Gbps can also aggregate two local ethernet ports to support such speeds, with DOCSIS 3.1 support allowing it to handle multi-gigabit internet speeds. The striking design of the routers serves a purpose, since the uplifted "wings" hide the antennas while holding them at an optimal position. One can also wall-mount the routers, and the units are optimised for both indoor and outdoor coverage.
The RAX80 is available now, with the RAX120 to follow on Q1 2019.
