NETGEAR WNDR3800 Pro Reviews

Being the junior model in Netgear’s premium router series, the WNDR3800 features an eye-pleasing exterior, a good but not exactly cutting-edge hardware platform and revised firmware. It has a few promising capabilities such as ReadyShare Cloud and Netgear Genie but they do not look polished off as yet. The router is very fast in PPTP and L2TP mode, allowing you to download files from the internet at 300 Mbps and higher. A direct or PPPoE connection can also be fast, up to 450 Mbps. The Wi-Fi module can deliver over 100 Mbps with certain adapters but you may have a low speed if the WNDR3800 doesn’t like your specific adapter model. The USB port with support for USB hubs helps turn the router into a NAS, enable a multimedia server and use backup utilities, including Time Machine. You can also share a printer or all-in-one after connecting them to the router’s USB port. External USB disks can be used for establishing a FTP server accessible from the internet. The only problem is that the access control settings are too limited. The cloud service ReadyShare Cloud, when its software aspect is properly polished off, will allow you to access data from any internet-enabled PC or mobile gadget.

The Netgear N600 (WNDR3800) offers reliable and swift wireless networking performance and it runs 2.4GHz and 5GHz networks simultaneously. It also comes with very useful content filtering options and a USB port that can be used to share a hard drive remotely with a minimum of fuss. We like it.

As with many new products, the Windows platform is fully supported, but MacOS support hasn't been fully implemented yet. For the MacOS platform, there's a ReadySHARE printer client and a beta version of Genie. Still under development, but scheduled for release fairly soon is client support for remote access via ReadySHARE as well as a bypass account utility for Live Parental Controls. There is MacOS Time Machine support for the WNDR3800, but currently there's only for 10.5 and 10.6. Time Machine support for 10.7 (Lion) should be available via a firmware upgrade "in a couple of weeks". Note that I pass these "futures" along for your information, but not as guarantees. Vendors have many priorities, which often change. So when and if these features appear is entirely undetermined. Open source fans will appreciate that there's already WNDR3800 support from DD-WRT, Open-WRT and Tomato. I don't know what features are included in the open source distributions. But it's hard to imagine that they have support for all of the WNDR3800's premium features.

The Netgear WNDR3800 N600 Wireless Dual-Band Gigabit Router makes an excellent router for any home.

It's a lot of money to spend on a router, but the N600's specification and performance certainly match its premium price.