Netgear FR114W 802.11b Wireless Ready Cable/DSL Router

Rating:
Summary: Excellent product but beware of the bad ports syndrome.
Review: I bought this brand new FR114W last year end of July. It has worked like a charm ever since until recently. First let me give you the pluses.
_Automatic recognizes PPOE settings for easy authentication and setup.
_Firewall a plus nothing gets past it until you enter a ip:port map to your internal network.
_Logs, another plus, it gives details of all attempts of access to your current WAN ip. DDOS, ipspoofing etc. as well, it emails the logs acording to your rules...
_syslog entries to any internal syslog capable software of all activities that the FR114W fires at the logs.
_It registers your dynamic ip address from the PPOE connection to DynDNS.org which is a big PLUS. Although they can have more options like noip.com
_DHCP capable Lan Setup.
_Remote internet management. This is not recommended unless you restrict it to a particular ip but beware of ip spoofing.
_Wireless ready. WEP ready up-to 128 bit encryption, Trusted PCs by MAC although MediaAccessControl can be spoofed as well, but then they would have to try to guess the key for the encryption as well as the channel and if you have unchecked "SSID brodcast" and "Bridging to wired LAN" you should be pretty safe. Although they can still guess your pwd for the admin site of the FR114W and then your doomed.
_Block access to any site you wish. This is specially good if you want control any access to a particular site from your kids. Drawback is that you have to enter every site you want to block fqdn (fully qualify domain name ex. www.thissite.com) or ip address. But you have the control.

These are by far the most important features which are hard to find without a hefty price tag.

The negatives are
_With the 802.11b MA401 wireless card, access range is weak. At my house a radius of 30ft. is pushing its limit.
_The 4 ports at the back of my FR114W unit went bad after a year of non-stop usage. But Netgear has a 3 yr. warranty on this units so they are replacing it, but choose from three options.
1. send the unit and when we receive it we'll send you one back.
2. $15 +/- and we'll send you one then you send us the bad one back.
3. $25 +/- and we send you one overnight of course I have to send the bad one back.

Anyways, I did go with option 2 and I should be receiving the refurbished FR114W soon. Yeap, you read correctly "refurbished" which in the dictionary means "To make clean, bright, or fresh again; renovate." so I do not feel that bad.

Overall, I give this FR114W unit high ratings as I do not expect for everyone to go through the bad ports syndrome as I did. Also I hope that the refurbish unit does live up to my ratings of it.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent router, wireless signal slightly weak
Review: This is an excellent router with rock solid performance. Unlike my previous Linksys BEFSR41 which needs to be reset every couple of weeks and drops game connections more often than I'd like. This one maintains game connection well. Router admin operations (most) does not drop any existing connections, unlike the Linksys which resets the router at the slightest configuration change. The SPI firewall works nicely and the latest firmware (beta as of this writing) supports UPNP (Windows Messenger Audio/Video). One nice feature is you can turn off the wireless to LAN bridge, so your roommates can surf the internet but can't physically access any machine wired directly to the router.

On the down side, the wireless signal strength (with a Netgear wireless card) is a little on the weak side. Hardly a surprise considering it's using the wireless card. You may re-consider if you need one that covers a lot of range. The telnet interface is also gone, but most people probably don't care. At one time, my router started to emit a high pitch hiss, caused by long usage of the wireless portion. I disconnected the power for a while and now it seems to be ok. Maybe they used a cheap component somewhere.

There's a different model called FR114P, essentially the same, except it lacks the wireless slot but adds a print server port. You may look into it if you don't need wireless capabilities.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent router, wireless signal slightly weak
Review: This is an excellent router with rock solid performance. Unlike my previous Linksys BEFSR41 which needs to be reset every couple of weeks and drops game connections more often than I�d like. This one maintains game connection well. Router admin operations (most) does not drop any existing connections, unlike the Linksys which resets the router at the slightest configuration change. The SPI firewall works nicely and the latest firmware (beta as of this writing) supports UPNP (Windows Messenger Audio/Video). One nice feature is you can turn off the wireless to LAN bridge, so your roommates can surf the internet but can�t physically access any machine wired directly to the router.

On the down side, the wireless signal strength (with a Netgear wireless card) is a little on the weak side. Hardly a surprise considering it�s using the wireless card. You may re-consider if you need one that covers a lot of range. The telnet interface is also gone, but most people probably don�t care. At one time, my router started to emit a high pitch hiss, caused by long usage of the wireless portion. I disconnected the power for a while and now it seems to be ok. Maybe they used a cheap component somewhere.

There�s a different model called FR114P, essentially the same, except it lacks the wireless slot but adds a print server port. You may look into it if you don�t need wireless capabilities.