Netgear WN2500RP-100NAS N600 Desktop WiFi Range Extender (WN2500RP)

The Answer!Due to a somewhat rural location, a profound lack of desire to dig several hundred feet of trenches, and Verizon's horrid treatment of their loyal customers, the only way I can get internet at my house is to borrow from a neighbor (with their full permission, of course).Trouble is, my neighbor is a couple hundred feet away (line of sight) and the signal from the source router is feeble in most parts of my house. Digging a trench for a cable is not feasible. I've tried to set regular routers, including Netgear routers, as repeaters, which was a wonderfully effective way to waste several hours of your life.Enter the Netgear N600 Dual Band Wi-Fi Range Extender!Since my neighbor is using an old Westell DSL modem, I disabled the wireless on that and installed a Netgear N600 wireless router to connect with the range extender. With a strong password, the extender connected right to the source router with no trouble.It holds the connection well, though the status light often goes from green to yellow, indicating a poor, but still solid, signal. I should note there are two trees and one wall in the 200 feet between the source and the router, so this isn't terrible. In fact, I have never had a noticeable problem with signal degradation, other than the idiot light of course. I'm still pleased, as Plan B was to dig a short trench, run Cat 5 and power to an exterior box, and place the router on the other side of the trees. I'm glad I didn't have to do all that.The extender acts as a router, and is the hub of my network in my house. All of my wired and wireless devices connect to it, and none of them know they're not connected to an actual wired network.This includes my AT&T Microcell, which specifically demands an all wired network. Not with this baby!The only character flaw with this extender is, now and then, it needs to be powered off and on. This only happens about once a month or so, and is not entirely uncommon for wireless routers. I only mention this because you want to place it in a location that is easy to access when you need to power cycle it.Well, it also only has four ports. Even in my tiny place, I need more. (Smart TV, Xbox, Wii, DirectTV, Microcell, file server, future gadgets) This isn't really a minus, as four is standard for home routers, and I do have a geeky setup. Another Netgear router is handing the leftovers, though a switch would do just as well. The ports are only 10/100, however this is plenty fast enough to watch movies on my Xbox media server.It also has no external antenna connector, which is silly on something that is fairly sensitive to location.It functions as it should, even with these somewhat minor flaws. Besides the wired stuff, I have no trouble with wireless connections, which include two Iphones, two Kindles, and at one point four laptops (told you I was a geek).Another nice benefit is you can make anything with a wired port into a wireless device. This is real handy for home entertainment centers, if you don't like running wires through your home.In my old house, it cost several hundred dollars to run CAT 5 cabling. Two of these would have sufficed, with the added benefit of being able to bring them with me when I moved, or move them around the house as my geekiness evolved.If you need a long wired network without the wires, this is what you need to buy.Highly RecommendUPDATE 01/01/2017Happy New Year!I have since moved from Nowhereville, however I left this extender for the new residents.I'm happy to report it is still working great.I should note that, in this part of Nowhere, utility companies tend to take a casual approach to maintaining power lines and such. As a result, power outages are expected during storms, windy days, and days that end in "day." Brownouts and power surges aren't surprising either.This unit takes all that like a champ.Same goes with static electricity. In the dry, windy high desert, one becomes fairly immune to going through the day where every damn thing you touch gives you a shock.I see the price has dropped to just over half of what I paid for mine. If you're not looking for the latest and greatest, but you want something that will easily stream movies, you can't go wrong with this.

I have used other wireless range extenders that are just repeaters. While these are effective, and offer the convenience of defaulting to the same SSID so as to cut down on confusion for your users, they also have some limitations... That is, by the nature of repeaters, certain functionality is broken. In my case, the issue was multicast. My Xbox 360 associated to the repeater could no longer connect to my UPnP-based media server, since UPnP uses multicast for discovery. Enter this Netgear WiFi range extender...So, for my fellow geeks, this is NOT, technically speaking, a wireless range extender/repeater. It's a wireless bridge with an additional dual-band WAP built in, and it is AWESOME. So here's how it works:1) You plug it in and turn it on.2) You associate your laptop or whatever else to it and navigate to a URL. It will capture your request and forcibly redirect it to its internal setup wizard.3) In the wizard, you associate the range extender to your main access point and pick out TWO new SSIDs for the new 2.4 Ghz and 5 Ghz networks. In theory, I suppose you could set the same SSID - I didn't try. I decided I'd rather actually subdivide my network into different SSIDs so I'd have control over which WAP my devices connected to. The wizard points out that they recommend doing it as I did it, so I guess that implies you *could* use the same SSID, but I don't know for sure.4) Profit!I don't think the 2.4 Ghz side supports 40 hz (300 mbps) 802.11n, since the highest connection rate I saw from my laptop was 130 mbps, but the 5 ghz side connects at 300 mbps consistently. According to my main router/WAP (which only supports 2.4 ghz), the range extender is connected at 144 mbps. Again, I don't know if 40 hz is supported.I didn't see any option to choose which channels the new networks transmit on. According to Vistumbler, the 2.4 ghz side is broadcasting on channel 3, which is the same as my main network. Whether it does this because it's what I chose for my main network or because it automatically chose a non-saturated channel, I can't say.Using Speedtest.net, throughput and latency through the extender was virtually indistinguishable from my main router/WAP.Some hardcore geeks might take issue with the lack of fine control I've illustrated, but overall, I really don't miss it. It's simple to set up, it works well (every corner of my house has good wifi coverage now), and it has a four-port switch built in, so I have no complaints.

Funciona de maravilla!