Wireless Speed With Netgear By Zenith4183 on Jan 08, 2009 - Updated Oct 15, 2011

Recently, my parents' router died on them. I went with my mom to Staples since she had a coupon for there to help find a new router. Since my dad now has a laptop, he wanted a wireless one. It would be helpful for me as well for when I was home as I also had a laptop.

Staples only had two brands of router: Linksys and Netgear. As I consider the Linksys brand to be junk based on experience with their routers and my mom wanted to use that coupon, that left the choice with Netgear which I had no previous experience with other than a tiny travel router I own. My mom decided on this particular router due to its 10x speed and coverage.

When we got back I immediently began to set it up. This is where I ran into a problem. Most routers give the router IP address to connect to it and set it up. This one gave a website. I was trying to set this up on a computer without an internet connection as my dad was currently using the only computer that could connect to the internet, so this put a delay in me preparing the router for connection. I guessed every common default router IP address with no luck, so the setup had to be put on hold.

Eventually, I was able to get an internet connection and begin setting up the router. The firmware on this router, even for a direct connection, was surprising slow which was kind of annoying. Some security settings were also a little difficult to find as I was not used to this brand of router. It has all the security settings most wireless routers have: WEP,WPA, MAC filtering, etc.

After it was set up, the speed of the internet through the router's wireless signal was great. Unfortunately, despite the 10x coverage, the basement is still a dead spot. Once set up, I've not had any problems with this router.

This router also has a blue disk of lights on top and a band of blue lights wrapping around it that dance around. I found the dancing lights to be kind of annoying and a waste of electricity. Fortunately, the manufacturers included an off switch for this feature.