I was interested in setting up a new wireless network in my home. I run a couple of servers out of my home, which run this site as well as a few others. I have tried products by Linksys, D-Link, and Netgear and for the most part networking products for the home have much improved in ease of use as well as performance. Technology has come a long way and setting up a wireless network in your home has become very reasonably priced. With better security and speed there is almost no reason not to use a wireless network over a wired. This statement can be argued of course and I can see an argument for both sides, but for most people a wireless network is sufficient for ones needs. I’ve been pretty happy with Netgear’s products and I was looking for an Ethernet wireless bridge and a main wireless base station. I use the Netgear WGPS606 for my living room to connect my Mac Mini, cable box, and hopefully a game system in the near future. For my main base station I chose the Netgear WPN824 RangeMax Wireless Router. This router has suited my needs very well.

I live in a two-bedroom apartment and the range of the Netgear WPN824 has been much better than any of the previous wireless routers I have owned. I started out with a Linksys 802.11b router, then a Netgear 802.11g router, and then upgraded to the WPN824. The web interface setup is very easy to use. I was able to setup WPA security on the unit very easily and setup port forwarding to my web servers and remote machines. Connecting the wireless bridge was easy as well and works pretty well. There is a little bit of lag between idle times, but it is respectable for what it is doing. I was able to connect a few laptops up to the unit and disable broadcasting of the SSID with the click of a button. Overall reliability and speed has been good with the unit and there is really much more good than bad.

The only things I don’t really care for in home products are they are somewhat limited in advanced firewall options. Port forwarding only really occurs to one machine. Setting up a more advanced firewall on a Linux machine or something more enterprise level gives much more options. As I said before though, it is a home router and for most people the security options of the unit is more than adequate. Most people don’t even enable the security features leaving them vulnerable so I would doubt they would need the advanced firewall options that I would need.

In conclusion, I can say the Netgear WPN824 works and it’s in about the same price range of competitors in its class. I would recommend purchasing some of the latest wireless products because they offer better speed over greater range. After configuring the products correctly you almost set it and forget it. I think people tend to take for granted the reliability of products. On that note, if you don’t have to worry about the reliability it makes one more efficient in their tasks. Feel free to leave feedback on your experiences with this product.