Review on NETGEAR WGT624NA Wireless Firewall Router by Joseph Neal

I bought this product to use with an Orinoco Gold 802.11b laptop board and a new 802.11g bridge to bridge it with my to connect LAN. From the start (with firmware built in) and through 5 different firmware revisions (including the latest version 4.1.11 released on 06/24/2004) this unit has had serious problems when running in mixed mode (both B and G) worked. Customers). The G-Client works reasonably well at around 75% link quality at 15 feet, but the B-Client suffers from poor transfer rates and unstable link quality. Node B keeps switching to a 1Mbps connection even though it's about 30 feet away and the SNR is over 30. Usually the connection stays at 6 Mbps with a random jump to 11 Mbps (I've tried every frequency). Client card B is known to be good as it works great with 5 other brand routers and with Netgear's own MR814v2 router. The problem is exacerbated when large amounts of data are transferred between two wireless nodes (B to G or G to B). I tried contacting Netgear support regarding this issue. After their initial response (about a week and a half after the initial inquiry was sent) that my loyalty card B must be faulty as they had never experienced anything similar to my situation in the lab, I explained to them that I had checked a lot of stuff. including disabling 802.11g and 108Mbps on the WGT624v2 and moving both devices. I also told them that the Netgear MR814v2 has none of these issues. Three weeks later, I still haven't received a response to my repeated emails asking for a solution. I have to say that Netgear offers EXTREMELY poor post-purchase support (this isn't my first experience with it). Since then, the router began to randomly completely drop the connection to the 802.11b peer for 3-5 seconds at a time of about 10 seconds. -15 times in a row. In terms of design, the WGT624 is missing a few areas. The 108 Mbit/s mode also has a fatal flaw: In the 108 Mbit/s "Turbo" mode, the router only works with the often crowded and noisy channel 6. The port forwarding mechanism is very simplified and can be used to be desired. Mapping an external port to another internal port is not possible (i.e. comes in as 8888, goes to internal server as 80). When giving meaningful names to mappings, do not use spaces or the "+", "-", or "." characters. This product is a big disappointment as Netgear usually makes good products. If you need support for a product, good luck because you won't get it from Netgear. Unless you live in a fairly rural area with very little interference, few people with wireless devices, and only plan on using Netgear 108Mbps client cards, I strongly recommend staying away from this poor product.