If you fancy somethin to do, take a few moments to read and rate my other reviews.
If you fancy somethin to do, take a few moments to read and rate my other reviews.
Member since:17.01.2003
Reviews:20
Members who trust:4
For the record i am a technical person so for me some of what i needed to do wasnt all that much of a chore but i hope this all helps you with your purchase.
I have BT Broadband and i live close enough to my local exchange to get a the 1mbit service.
I previously connected with a BT Voyager router and had no problems, so one day i decide to go wireless and put my faith in a trusted brand such as netgear.
Once i received the router i unpacked it and hooked it up to my broadband, with only a few clicks i was up and running with a basic working setup.
for those who need a littel more out of this that a basic setup this device also includes the following combined features, ADSL modem/router, 4 port 10/100mb switch, wireless access point, dual NAT and SPI firewall. This device might not be the best in its class but it is excelent value for money for being feature rich.
Wireless is secured with WEP, WPA and you can also enable MAC address filtering so that only autherised network devices can fully connect.
*NOTE* Be sure to change the admin password as information like that is public knowledge on the likes of www.portforward.com should anyone manage to connect to it from both inside or outside your home network they will no doubt play around.
However my ADSL link would occationaly drop off with the router log showing "LCP Down" and "Waiting for LCP to come up" in an endless loop. So i upgraded from the basic firmware 1.01.00 to the latest on their site 1.02.04
this fixed the problem only patially in that i stayed connected longer but still had dropouts.
So now i was looking into this more and realised that when i monitored my router status i found my signal to noise ratio would drop down to negative numbers when i was getting drop offs, so i used a few methods to improve this in my property by making a few chages to my internal phone wires (dont try this at home unless you know what your doing)
The result was an increase in my signal to noise ratio of over 3db.
This improved things more but still the occational drop, so i called BT and informed them of all my work, after getting passed to various people i got an engineer to talk to, they offered to increase the gain on my line to maximum, after that was done all has been fine. I now have my pc, laptop and my xbox running through this router flawlessly and fully secured.
hope this helps any potential buyers, basicly this unit is great but needs a firmware upgrade and good ADSL Line to run on.
** Update Note **
I am now using this router on BT's Broadband max technology, i am fortunate enouhg to get around 4.5 - 5mbs downstream.
During the 10 day training period i only encountered 1 drop off while i was connected. since then this router has not missed a beat and works flawlessly with the new broadband technology. to thumbs up for netgear.
How helpful would this review be to a person making a buying decision? Rating guidelines
Advantages: Easy to use, good security features, lots of extras for thse who want to use them Disadvantages: Not the cheapest, documentation might not be great in the event of problems
Advantages: Small footprint, 802.11b, g and pre-n supported, easy to use and customise Disadvantages: Control panel can appear daunting at first, help provided could be more concise
very helpful by (58%):
helpful by (33%):
somewhat helpful by (8%):
