I recently installed one of Netgear's Rangemax routers in a home office. I was very impressed with the wireless distance and more importantly the signal strength the new RangeMax routers from Netgear achieved.
The home was not an average home office. Some of the node locations were behind several walls and even a cement wall. Now we all know that traditional sheet rocked walls degrade signal quality the least so seeing the signal pass strongly through those walls was no great achievement but even in this case, the was literally no loss at all. Through the concrete and plaster I had excellent signal strength on one of the desktops that was behind the combination.
The configuration was very much the same at other products of it's category but only found a dislike in the fact that when I made a change to the configuration, Internet access was hampered somewhat. This may have been a coincidental occurrence but it was noticeable. The change that was being done at the time was a DNS server address change for client of the DHCP server. Another thing that I found curious, but one I've seen on many other home networking products, was a change not "sticking" . What I mean by this is that when the change was applied to the router, again it was in the DHCP section and had to do with the ip address range for the scope, it didn't actually take. The page showed the change but when a computer on the network tried to get a new ip address it continued to get the old ip address.
This was a little disturbing and after wasting a little time trying and retrying to get a new address on the computer, I realized the problem was on the the router itself. I reapplied the settings even though as mentioned the page showed the address changes I made, and restarted. The changes applied and stayed as I wanted them this time and the computer received a new updated ip address from the router.
Aside from those really trivial events, the Rangemax 824v3 router worked very well and had some very nice throughput. It was noticeably better that the other (manufacturer will remain unnamed) router that it replaced. Wireless security was improved over older models too. It had my favorite combination of wireless security features of WPA, TKIP, AES - and they worked very well. The Netgear Rangemax wireless router also support URL content filtering and web site logging.
- For a full list of features see Netgear's Rangemax page.
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