wireless routers

I bought this router to replace my great Linksys BEFSR41 wired router in order to gain wireless network access with my laptop. At under $50 it represents unbeatable value. It worked straight out of the box and its performance is excellent.

It has 1 x 10Mb/s WAN port, 4 x 100Mb/s Ethernet wired ports, as well as 11Mb/s 802.b11 wireless access. It makes an excellent replacement for my Linksys since it provides much of its functionality with wireless access added. It can be configured using a browser and it has one of the best configuration interfaces I've seen. The following comments related to the latest version of the firmware: 4.09.

It has a configurable firewall that supports port forwarding and can be set to block specific ports to selected internal IP addresses. All blocking can be scheduled to operate only at specific times. It can also block specific websites, a feature I don't have any use for. It cannot, however, block specific MAC addresses, which is an important feature if you are using DHCP. Even if you are not, static IP address can be easily changed by users on the network. Therefore, in my opinion, MAC blocking is a must for a future version of the firmware.

On the wireless side it supports up to 128-bit encryption as well as MAC filtering. It does not however allow you to disable wireless operation. For me, this is another important omission in the current firmware. Being able to schedule wireless operation times would be a nice security enhancement. Why have it run all night when you are sleeping, or during the day when you are at work?

I am hopeful that in the future the firmware will evolve to provide more useful features and perhaps drop some of the less useful ones. If it were to gain all of the functionality of my Linksys I would be extremely happy. As a minumum I believe that it should allow MAC blocking and it should allow wireless operation to be disabled/scheduled. Since this is a relatively new model there's a good chance that this will happen, especially given Netgear's excellent past record in home networking devices.

Considering the price of this router hovers around $30-40, it's a great deal for a well-featured 802.11b router with 4 ethernet ports. The ethernet ports are 10/100Mbps and the WAN port is 10Mbps. The router can go up to 128bit WEP, MAC filtering (good for keeping others off your connection), and it does a fine job of serving as a NAT/firewall too.

I have had a few problems, notably the connection completely locking up in times of high activity (e.g. during a CS game). Giving the router a power cycle cleared this up the last few times, and it hasn't been an issue since then (yet). Arguably a minor issue.

Although I have had my share of wireless issues (I'm using an Intel Centrino laptop), I've found the wireless connection to work quite well and reasonably stable, even with 64bit WEP turned on. I've found that updating the router firmware, Intel PRO/2100 drivers, and using 64bit WEP helps. Updating the firmware is a good idea anyway, as the latest firmware fixes quite a lot of issues, including the ugly interface in the factory firmware if you use Mozilla. Ditto for the drivers. Sometimes rebooting with the wireless card enabled at startup helps too.

For those techies out there that must know, I believe the chipset used in this device is an Intersil.

The wireless range on the MR814 isn't great, but that's probably a result of the building I'm in more than of the product itself. Expect about 20-30 feet of good coverage.

As of this writing, features that might be useful but are currently missing from the firmware are ability to disable wireless broadcast completely, ability to reduce power supplied to wireless antenna, and the use of alphanumeric WEP keys (MR814 only supports HEX at present).

We've long had a single computer in our four-person house, and now that we're finally expanding that number to three (all Windows), we wanted an easy way to network them for file- and DSL-sharing. We also wanted wireless capability, because my wife's new laptop would be roaming about and the two desktops would be far enough across the house from each other to make stringing network cable rather impractical (especially to this hardware-klutz). After much review-searching, we decided to try Netgear products, and the MR814 router sounded ideal.

Setting up the MR814 was very easy. The setup software was straightforward, and printed instructions very carefully walk the uncertain user through those. With one computer cable-plugged into the router, it was easy to have the router up and running in about 10-15 minutes. Another 15-20 minutes spent installing a MA521 card into the WinXP laptop, and we had wireless. 15 minutes to install an MA111 adapter on the family WinXP desktop, and we were all set. Both wireless connections get strong dependable signals from across the house (typically 40-50 feet and 2 or 3 walls away), complete with 128-bit WEP. And the remaining desktop plugs in directly via cabled port with no problems.

Generally comfortable with Windows computers, but relatively clueless about networking, I'm very happy with our Netgear home network.