I’ve had a Netgear Nighthawk AC1900, the R7000, running as my main router for five months now, and in that time it has never once made it through a full day without dropping and rebooting itself, sometimes only once, sometimes half a dozen times before I’ve had breakfast. The worst of it cost me a video call and, on a separate evening, a download I had to start over from zero because the connection didn’t just blip, the whole router went dark and came back a couple of minutes later like nothing had happened.

It can’t hold a connection for a full day

The pattern is always the same. The Wi-Fi drops first, the LEDs on the front go dark, and thirty seconds to two minutes later the router comes back up on its own, having rebooted rather than recovered. On a good day that happens once. On a bad one it’s happened as often as six or seven times, and there’s no obvious trigger I’ve been able to pin down: not time of day, not how many devices are connected, not whether anything’s actually pushing real bandwidth through it at the time.

When it’s actually staying up, the AC1900 spec does what it says on the tin. Dual-band, 600Mbps on 2.4GHz and 1300Mbps on 5GHz, four Gigabit LAN ports, and a Broadcom BCM4709A0 doing the work behind it. None of that is the problem. The problem is that it won’t stay up long enough for any of it to matter.

Every firmware version I’ve tried has changed nothing

My first assumption was firmware, because it usually is. I updated to the current release straight from Netgear’s own support page, waited a week, and the reboots kept coming on the same rough schedule as before. I then rolled back to the previous major version, on the theory that Netgear had broken something recent, and that changed nothing either. I’ve now tried the current firmware and two older releases before it, and the reboot frequency hasn’t moved in either direction across any of them, which rules out a bad update as the explanation and points somewhere else entirely.

Mine sits on an open shelf, not stuffed inside a cabinet or stacked on top of a modem, which is the usual first suggestion for a router that’s overheating. It made no difference. If a case this size, in the open air, still can’t keep the internals cool enough to stay up for a day, that’s a design problem with the R7000 itself, not a placement problem with mine.

Not worth buying, and I’d be wary of the range generally

The R7000 is long past being sold new, which is probably not a coincidence given how many owners have described the identical fault, and picking one up secondhand now mostly means picking up someone else’s reboot problem along with it. It launched at £165 in 2014, which was a fair price for an AC1900 router at the time, and secondhand units now go for anywhere between £15 and £40, which sounds like a bargain until you remember what you’re actually getting for it.

I’d also stop short of assuming this is an R7000-specific fault worth risking on a different Nighthawk model instead. The overheating-linked reboot complaints aren’t confined to this one product page, and a router line with this pattern of failure across more than one model is a line I’m no longer willing to recommend on the strength of one good spec sheet.

The verdict

A 22 isn’t a score I hand out lightly, and a router that’s fast and has decent range when it’s actually working doesn’t usually end up this low, but stability isn’t optional in a router, it’s the entire job, and this one fails at it daily. Don’t buy this one new or secondhand, and until Netgear can show the rest of the Nighthawk range doesn’t share the same fault, I’d shop elsewhere for your next router entirely.