Upfront is a vertical line of LEDs that show that the router is powered up, online as well as individual dots showing wired network activity. There are also lights to show a USB drive is connected, and whether the 2.4-, 5- and 6GHz wireless bands are being used. 

The bottom has a button to start the WPS process for adding a device and one for turning off the lights, although the power LED remains on when the router is operating. On the downside, the RS700 lacks the pair of data screens that the TP-Link Archer BE900 has to show anything from the weather and time to its connection status and CPU usage.

The tri-band RS700S has 8 internal antennas arranged to create a spherical transmission pattern that Netgear engineers optimized to cover a main floor, one above and one below. It can work with up to 200 devices at a time and uses Broadcom’s BCM6726/3 Wi-Fi chipset to deliver 4X4 performance on the 2.4, 5 and 6GHz bands for 12 independent streams of data. The router has a 2.6GHz quad-core processor, 2GB of RAM and 512MB of storage and tops out at a throughput of 19Gbps, matching that of the Archer BE800 (the BE900 hits a peak at 24Gbps). Still, it remained cool during my use and hit a maximum temperature of 91 degrees Fahrenheit.

Specifications: