PSA: Netgear R7500 now supports 5GHz DFS channels in the US, as does Xbox One

Putzing around with a Netgear R7500 today I discovered that it now supports configuring the 5GHz radio to use DFS channels in the US. Looking at firmware release notes it looks like the R7000 also supports DFS in Europe but not the US, yet. This is very cool and here is why:

DFS channels are a good chunk of space in the 5GHz spectrum that is reserved for non Wi-Fi use in many countries. Several of these countries opened up the spectrum for use by Wi-Fi devices, as long as these devices use dynamic frequency selection (DFS) to ensure that if they detect that non-Wi-Fi traffic with priority (like weather radar) are operating in the channels that the Wi-Fi device switches back to non-DFS channels. Not many devices currently support DFS channels, so this often results in a large chunk of wireless spectrum that isn't in use.

The Xbox One supports connecting to access points operating in DFS channels in many countries, so if you have an R7500 in the US or R7000 in Europe give this a shot.

A list of DFS reserved channels can be found here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_WLAN_channels