Rating:

So I have bought this baby.

Works perfect with Hauwei e1752, very easy to configure, web admin is very responsive and easy to navigate. All the goodies inside, WiFi encryption, MAC filtering, configurable DHCP, packet filtering, DMZ. NAT etc, Connects mobile network faster then software that was supplied by provider. WiFi rage very good. Box stays cool all the time. Compared to my previous Linksys it is a freezer. VPN works fine.

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Set up was a piece of cake. Just follow the wizzard and everything worked first time.

Brilliant 5 out of 5 !

Rating:

There’s a lot of hype on the box about its wireless range, whereas it’s in reality poor at best. The drivers tell me I’m getting a 100+mbit connection via wireless N, but the signal strength is so poor that it can’t maintain it for very long. My old WRT could easily reach the end of the garden from its spot at the front of the house. In fact, I’ve disabled the wireless on the WNR and I’ve relocated the WRT to a more central location and improved the wireless for the whole house.

I might switch back to the WRT if it can reliably squeeze 50mbit through it’s wired connections.

On the plus side, it was painless to install, just plug and play really and the content filtering and firewall were easy to configure and are working just fine. The supplied USB wireless dongle works fine and was again simple to set up, though no better than the edimax dongle that I had previously (I swapped it over to see if it improved the wireless range paired with the router, it didn’t).

So 3 stars, 2 for being easy to install and set up and one for being free. Down points for having crap wireless range despite the hype and a painfully slow web interface.

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No regrets buying this.

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The good ….

All the following devices, wired (W), wireless (WL), perform faultlessly …

IBM ThinkCentre S50 (W)

IBM Lenovo T61 (W and WL)

Netgear ReadyNAS Duo (W)

PS3 (WL)

X-BOX 360 (WL)

IBM Thinkpad T40 (WL)

Squeezebox (WL)

My only slight quibble, and certainly the routers ADSL predecessor didn’t do this, is that whenever I tweak a setting in the Advanced Wireless Settings, Wirelss Access List options, where you can enable device access by MAC address, the firmware insists on disconnecting and reconnecting. This brings down all devices for a few seconds. The reason I’m in here fairly frequently, is to bump my lazy teenagers off their X-BOX and PS3 and the simplest way when I’m working downstairs and they are upstairs is to slightly change their MAC addresses by one character, and apply the changes, as such, hey presto, they are off! Well from a networked games perspective at least! It would of course be nice to see this issue fixed, or even better, a radio button next to each device to simply enable/disable – and even better still, an option to enable/disable devices via their MAC address at certain times of the day

(update 18th Nov 2009 – firmware 1.2.3.7 has just been released and resolves this issue – than you NetGear). All firmware changes I will put to Netgear, and if I hear anything back, I’ll add to this review, but in the meantime, I give this device a strong thumbs up as for me, it does exactly what I’d expect of it, bolting all of my IT gadgets in to a cohesive whole, and providing me with a headache free environment in which to work (and yes, another strong point in it’s favour – I do work from home, 8 hours a day, so believe me, if it were playing me up, I’d be highly critical of it)

Rating:

However I thought that I should write a review as at the time there were only 4 reviews on Amazon about this product – all not very happy with the router & this nearly put me off buying it. However I took a chance thinking that I could return it & I am glad I did! Hence I thought I should even the “review scales” a little…

First off – obviously sorry to hear that it didn’t work for others that well but for me it was very useful. I had bought it specifically to get the UPnP feature as I thought that this would help me to get 2 XBOXes with seperate XBOX Live accounts to both have fully OPEN NAT connections. Without this my two boys could not play with their mates online at the same time very well.

Anyway the installation went smoothly – takes a little while but if you follow it to the letter then anyone should be able to do it. Next I connected in a couple of laptops (running Vista) both worked straight away. I also had a desktop with an ethernet connection (XP this time) & that worked no problems as well. Next the two XBOXes – they both connected with a dynamic IP on my LAN & because the UPnP is enabled on the router by default they both immediately worked! This really pleased me & the 2 boys. Finally I have connected in a Playstation 3 with a wireless connection & my work PC can connect to my office using VPN – again no problems.

All of the connections are running WPA2 security (which apparently is very secure – or so they say) & everything is going very well. The router admin page itself is very good – lots of features admittedly – but most of which you do not need to worry about unless you need them for something – as I said all of the above devices worked with no changes to the router configuration. Also for each feature there is the right third of the page that has handy instructions/help – again very useful.

By the way I am a Virgin Media customer – so works well with that ISP.

So for me it really sorted out all my issues – if you look on the web getting 2 XBOXes to work through one router can be a big problem so this is really good.

Hopefully it now works as good as it has for the last 3 days for years to come!

Well I hope that helps some folk…