Review on NETGEAR WGT624NA Wireless Firewall Router by Christopher Clearfield

I recently bought a laptop and needed to connect to a wireless network. I saw 108 Mbps and checked the routers. I read some positive reviews and bought it. It automatically detects the presence of new firmware and installs it. At least some advice. do not do that. I ran into some issues and Netgear tech support said to disable this feature. Setting up the router is quite easy. If you have your WAN settings ready, you should be able to connect them to the network without any problems. It took a while to get the wifi working because I was trying to use the maximum encryption available without realizing that it was some sort of paid service. I've set up basic WEP and my card connects fine. It seems to work well anywhere in the house. I have yet to test the range limits, but it seems to cover every area around the house that I would use it in. My speed seems pretty good, but it's not 108 Mbps. My wired systems are much faster. The WiFi is fast enough for my use, although I plan to get some test software to see what my actual throughput is. File transfers are a little slow, but since I don't do much of this from a laptop, it's not a big deal. The big problem I had was some kind of firmware issue messing up my port forwarding. If I configure more than one port ahead, everything in the list is unreadable and undeletable after the first configuration. When I tried to change the setting, the IP addresses didn't show up correctly and the name and port numbers were gibberish. Technical support forced me to download and manually install an older firmware version. This solved the problem. Sometimes when I change a setting I get a blank IE page instead of going back to where I made the change. However, the changes I made need to be accepted, so this is not a big problem. Having four ports built in is a good thing because I could just plug them into my current setup. It was also nice that they included a decent CAT5 cable so I could mount the unit remotely from other computing gear. (EMI is a common cause of connectivity issues with these devices.) Aside from a few minor annoyances, this router works well enough to recommend. Beginners may have more trouble with it than others. Netgear's tech support isn't that great by any stretch of the imagination, but they were efficient enough to resolve my issues. Make sure you register online before calling, otherwise you will not receive support. This is my first wireless router so I don't have a comparison, but in my experience my office ordered one for their 802 network and so far we haven't had any issues with it. (Of course, I was aware of its weaknesses by then.) I gave it 4 stars, but keep in mind it's actually 3.5 based on tech support. There were a few moments when I felt like I knew more about their product than they did.