A new network router, targeted at the burgeoning on-line gaming community, has been released by Netgear.
The new Nighthawk Pro Gaming XR500 Wifi router is said to offer gamers higher levels of speed, performance, personalisation and control.
Key features of the XR500 include a gaming dashboard that provides realtime bandwidth utilisation by device, ping delays and other parameters, and a geo-filter to prevent connections to “laggy” players connecting in remote locations.
It also comes with a built-in gaming VPN client to protect gamers’ identities online. This helps prevent distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks that force gamers offline through the spamming of IP addresses.
In addition, Quality of Service (QoS) functionality prioritises gaming devices and allocates bandwidth by device to eliminate lag due to queuing at the service provider’s network.
From a technical perspective, the Nighthawk Pro Gaming XR500 router includes hardware features such as a dual-core 1.7GHz processor, quad-stream Wave 2 WiFi with multi-user (MU) MIMO, and four external high-power antennas for improved coverage and faster speeds.
The XR500’s MU-MIMO WiFi is designed to stream simultaneously to multiple devices on the same network so several users can smoothly game online at the same time without affecting each other’s performances.