The Netgear D6400 comes in any colour you’d like, as long as that’s black
Sometimes it is better not to be at the front of a queue, oddly enough. A good example of why is the Netgear D6400, which when it launched earlier in the year cost roughly £150.
If it had crossed my reviewer inbox, then I’d have torn it a new one for being overpriced, but given an adjustment, it now seems like a much more realistic prospect.
As Netgear routers go, this one is a rather understated black plastic bevel box, which does its best to hide all the cabling connections at the back. It supports ADSL and VDSL through an internal modem, and you also get a red WAN Ethernet socket if you have a cable connection. There are four other standard LAN ports provided, and they’re all 10/100/1000 speed rated.
What most people would buy this for wouldn’t be Ethernet; it would be the AC 1600 wi-fi that uses 2.4GHz and 5GHz, and supports IEEE 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac standards.
Unfortunately, like so many AC-class routers these days, the speeds emblazoned on the box remain mostly theoretical. During my testing I got nowhere near those performance levels, especially using the 2.4GHz spectrum. For those that have 5GHz gear or ideally dual-band hardware, things are markedly better, though nothing amazing. The best performance I got was about 150MB/s by using an AC-class USB 3.0 dongle that the D6400 seemed to have a natural affinity with.
This underlined for me the whole problem with 802.11ac: until we get rid of all the ‘G’ and ‘N’ stuff, we’re unlikely to see what this technology can truly do. And in the meantime, the technology seems destined to disappoint.
What I do like about this design is that Netgear has included two USB 2.0 ports, not tried to oversell them as USB 3.0, and also added a DLNAcompatible media server to the firmware.
These are the sort of features that people find really useful, and Netgear also supports remote access to any external storage attached via its own Genie app for iOS or Android devices. It won’t replace a proper NAS box performance wise, but it’s useful for anyone for whom the expense of maintaining their own server isn’t justified.
My only other complaint about this design is that Netgear designed it to be exclusively upright but entirely forgot that the most natural place for it would therefore be on a wall. You can’t mount it, and the support foot doesn’t detach.
For many BT customers, the D6400 would seem the ideal replacement for their aging Home Hub 3, as it has many similarities to the current BT Home Hub 5. The problem there is that BT sells the Home Hub 5 for £69 to existing customers, and even bundling in a couple of BT-made AC dongles doesn’t make it cost more than the D6400.
The new, lower pricing of the D6400 makes it more attractive, but it still has some way to go before it competes with the cheapest AC 1600 and gigabit LAN routers around. Mark Pickavance
An all-services router at a more affordable price.
Features
• Works with ADSL and VDSL (BT Infinity)
• Five gigabit Ethernet ports
• AC 1600 dual-band wi-fi
• DLNA and FTP server
• SPI and NAT firewall
• Beamforming+ technology
• WPA/WPA2 encryption