NETGEAR WGT624NA Wireless G Firewall Router

I recently bought a laptop and had to go wireless with my network. I saw the 108Mbps and looked into the routers. I read some favorable reviews and bought it.It auto-detects if there is new firmware available and will install it. Just a tip though... don't do this. I ran into some troubles and Netgear Tech support said to disable this feature.The setup of the router is fairly straightforward. If you have your WAN settings readily available, you should be able to get it on-line without much trouble. It did take a bit to get the wireless up and running because I tried to use the highest encryption available without realizing that this is some sort of pay service. I set it to the basic WEP and my card connected fine.It seems to work fine everywhere in the house. I have yet to test it's limits for distance, but it seems to cover any area around the house where I'd use it.My speed seems fairly good, but it's no 108Mbps. My hardwired systems are quite faster. For my uses the wireless is fast enough, though I do plan to get some test software to see what my real throughput is. File transfers are somewhat slow, but since I don't do much of that from the laptop, it's no big deal.The big issue I ran into was with a firmware problem of some sort that screwed up my port forwarding. If I setup more than one port forward, anything in the list past the first setting was unreadable and unremoveable. If I went to modify the setting, the IPs came up wrong and the name was in gibberish as well as the port numbers. Tech support had me download and manually install an older firmware version. That solved the problem. On occasion, changing a setting brings me to a blank IE page instead of returning me to where I made the change. The changes I make do to take though, so this is not a major problem.Having the built-in four ports is nice because it allowed me to easily plug it into my current setup. It was also nice of them to include a decent sized CAT5 cable so I could mount the device away from my other computer equipment. (EMI is a common cause of connection problems with these devices.)Aside from some minor irritants, this router has performed well enough for me to recommend it. Novice users may have more trouble with it than others. Netgear's tech support is not that great by any means, but it was effective enough for me to get my troubles solved. Be sure to register on-line before you call or you will not be able to get support. This is my first wireless router so I don't have anything to rate it against, but based on my experiences, I had my office order one for their 802 network and so far we've had no troubles with it. (Granted, I knew about it's weak points by then.) I gave it 4 stars, but consider that as really 3.5, based on the tech support. There were a couple moments where I felt I knew more about their product than they did.

I have had this unit for several months during which it has performed almost flawlessly. This is not a full featured unit, but for the price, I don't think you can expect that -- it has basic wireless and WAN security, nothing fancy. However for a home user, it should be enough to keep your network relatively secure. On the wireless side it does provide TKIP security, which is a nice touch. Since 802.11 security is a nightmare anyhow, this is about the best you can do with little effort. On the WAN side, the simple firewall provides NAT and port redirection and the unit also provides a log so you can monitor activity. E-mail alerts are also available.There are a couple of small annoyances that I have found with this unit, and hence the four stars: The "Status" page on the GUI really doesn't provide the status at all. This is particularly annoying on the WAN side. It doesn't tell you if your link is up or down. An older SMC router I had previous to this one did, and made it much easier to troubleshoot connectivity problems when they do arrise. The second problem seems to be power related. There have been a couple of instances where the unit has frozen - usually after a storm. My router is on a UPS, so I suspect the problem is caused by fluctuations on the phone line. A reboot will clear the problem, but taking both of these issues into consideration, sometimes it takes a few minutes to re-establish internet connectivity once it has gone down. I have now gotten in the habit of rebooting both the router and the modem when connection is lost.One really nice security feature it does have on the GUI is a list of all of the clients associated to your router wirelessly as well as on the wired LAN. This is a great tool to see if someone has hacked your security and is using your internet connection. I would strongly recommend checking this page if you find your internet connection has slowed down and you can't find another reason why.I've found the wireless coverage to be excellent, too. I've used multiple client adapters with it - Cisco, Asante, Linksys - all without a problem of any sort. And considering this unit does not have diversity antennas, it has surprisingly little drop out.Overall, I feel this is a great unit for a home or home office. It is simple to setup, configure and maintain. My complaints are all minor and this unit has functioned for almost a year without any realy problem.