Netgear WGU624 Double 108 Mbps Wireless A+G Router

Rating:
Summary: Does NOT perform as described. Stay away from that product!
Review: 1) Constantly drops connection. Only seems to be stable in 'g only' mode without encryption (open system)
2) Poor tech support. The unit was replaced by Netgear with $15 shipping charges; however the replacement's performance issues are the same. As of now, the only security future that I'm able to use is MAC filtering.

Rating:
Summary: Not ready for prime time
Review: I bought the WGU624 before reviewers had time to play with it. I'll not make a mistake like that again. First, despite the claim of improved range it failed to deliver a useful signal to a location that my old D-Link managed to reach with decent signal quality.

Other than that, it ran well. The fun started when an electrician accidentally killed the breaker to my computer room. I don't know if a spike zapped something in the router but it never behaved right afterwards (although none of my other gear had this problem). It began by losing connections on the port-forwarding services. I had to keep restarting my email client to reach my mail server.

I finally decided to start over, following the instructions for resetting the router back to factory defaults. After that, the router dropped *all* connections after about 45 minutes. Repeating the reinstall didn't help.

To be honest, I never contacted Netgear's tech support about it. I'd read that they weren't very helpful and I didn't have the time or patience to go through that when I run a business depending on that router. I went to BestBuy and picked up a Linksys WRT54G for fifty bucks and it's run flawlessly.

Rating:
Summary: Terrible throughput problems with Netgear WGU624
Review: I just purchased the recently released Netgear WGU624 dual band a/b/g wireless router with the matching Netgear WAG511 adapter and I am having troubles downloading files at the maximum speeds offered by Comcast. Both wired and wireless computers are affected. Transfering within the LAN is no problem, I get better speeds than I did with my old routers, but trying to download from any site on the WAN, my speeds slow significantly to anywhere from 30k to 2k. I have no idea why. Browsing with Firefox seems fine though. Playing with the MTU values have no effect.

Rating:
Summary: Netgear Equals Superb Service
Review: This holiday season I was a good santa and purchased numerous wireless networking products for my various family members. Sure it was partially a selfish act as I wanted to be able to easily connect when I went to visit, but for the most part it was just an act of giving. I purchased mainly G products and they varied from routers to USB adapters to PC Card adapters. I did also purchase a couple of B products for those in the family that already had some wireless networking products (yes, I know they are backwards compatible but I didn't want to take any chances).

Only two members of the family had installation problems (considering my family is very non-technical I was quite impressed) and those two people both had yet to upgrade to Windows XP SP2. The rest of the family members were up and running within minutes.

As for the couple of family members that did have problems, well they called me first (of course) and I told them to just run back through the installation procedure again. This solved the problem for Uncle Dennis but Grandma Joyce still couldn't get it to work properly. I reluctantly told her to call Netgear's technical support (hey the reviews on Amazon haven't been too pretty for their tech support). I however was quite pleased when an hour later I got an email from Grandma Joyce thanking me for the great gift. I called her back and she told me that after fiddling with the settings with the Netgear people she was up and running within 30 minutes.

Overall, I consider this the ultimate test of product quality and support and I would give Netgear two thumbs up.

I hope this review was helpful to you in putting your mind at ease regarding ease of setup and trust of technical support if needed.