My brother got this for his Earthlink DSL. It never quite worked right. (Both of us took a look at it.) The connection would work for a few minutes, and then disconnect. To reconnect, you had to go through the setup again. This was quite annoying for general web browsing. However, it just won't work with internet gaming.
I had an older Linksys router w/o wireless and swapped with him. The Netgear works fine with my broadband service (SBC Yahoo!) I can VPN to work without any problems. The wireless works fine too.
As for my brother's Earthlink connection, the Linksys router is as steady as a rock.
I gave it 2 stars instead of 1 because it does seem happy with my SBC Yahoo! connection. If given a choice, I'd stick with Linksys.
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| I don't like it when people write reviews on here criticizing a product without giving real proof that it wasn't their fault. Some reviewer thought the router setup page didn't work with IE - but doesn't mention any attempt with a different browser. So beware of noobs. I have a MR814 v1, MR814 v2 and a D-Link 514 and none of them have offered the range this beast provides. I acquired this model after returning a defective MR814 v1, and initially I was annoyed to get an older model. But I think they sent this for a reason - it's much more reliable than the 814. Someone on here complains that they can't get reception over 100ft from the AP - how big is their house?? I have the router upstairs on one side of the house and can get a signal fine outdoors on the other side of the house - i.e. travelling through all the walls of the house (approx 42 ft away). Also I have tested it with my PCMCIA SMC card and a Netgear MA111 USB wifi dongle, and the dongle provdies better connection than the pcmcia, so there is some proper evidence of testing being done here. It doesn't look nearly as good (or as small) as my other routers but if it does the job as well as it has so far - it is my first choice. |
| I bought this thing about a year ago and it worked pretty well. For a while. But after having to reboot the thing every few weeks I started to get a little tired of it. Now, I am not trying to run a lot of machines through it - a Linux box on ethernet, a Sony Clie, Tivo, and an iMac over 802.11, plus Packet8 for my phone service over ethernet. No great strain on the processor. So, why does the thing insist on locking up so much? To add to the problem, you can be going along just nicely on ethernet and suddenly the 802.11 dies. Now, asside from the thing croaking and needing rebooting weekly, I get to do a complete factory reset once a month, wiping out all the stuff I have programmed into it (WEP keys, etc), because the thing will completely quit responding. One would think that the problems are related to something overheating. But no, that is not it. That leaves the unit's firmware to be suspect. After reading about Netgear's sloppy code writing and their DoS attack against the University of Wisconsin time servers, I have to believe software is the issue. If they wrote code as bad as that which caused the UofWisc flood, I am sure awful code abounds in all their products. |
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