An excellent Network Extender/Bridge. See my review for Asus RT-AC68U, which is the router I pair it with to provide a wireless bridge from my house to an external workshop, so I can plug in a wired PC as well as provide a stronger 2.4GHz network in my shop. Am using it in FastLane mode (5GHz dedicated connection to my router and 2.4GHz extended WiFi network in my workshop or vise versa), which supposedly provides better performance than the default mode (which extends both the 2.4 and 5GHz networks on two new ssid's). Advertised speeds are not very realistic, but performance and signal strength are drastically improved from my previous 802.11b/g/n network. While configuring both devices inches from each other, I got about 867Mbps, and after installing them in each building - with a direct line-of-site between the devices in two windows about 50 feet apart, and fiddling with the antennas a bit - I consistently get 702-867Mbps, which is about 70-80% of 1GB wired Ethernet speed, so I can't complain. You can also plug in a USB flash drive or external drive into it to provide shared network storage and media server, but I do not use this feature since my router does the same job. Initial setup using WPS was simple, but I had to configure it with the UI to get it working the way I wanted (FastLane setup and different network ssid's). It should theoretically work with any 2.4GHz or 5GHz WiFi router running 802.11a/b/g/n/ac, but you probably want to get a dual-band 802.11ac router if you want to get maximum performance like my Asus RT-AC68U or a LinkSys WRT1900AC, which I also considered getting and which reportedly works well with this router.
Note that the WiFi network(s) it extends use a different network ssid(s) than the original network ("yournetwork_2GEXT" or "yournetwork_5GEXT" by default unless you rename them), so you will have to configure your devices to use that network as well as your normal one. In other words, I have separate "wifi-home" and "wifi-workshop" networks, both 2.4GHz). There's no obvious way to disable the WiFi Extender part of the device (so you can just use it as a dedicated WiFi bridge without extending the WiFi network(s) using new ssid(s)), but you can disable it by unchecking the "Enable 2.4GHz WiFi" (or 5GHz) checkbox in the "Wireless" configuration section, which will then let you use the device purely as a bridge for wired 10/100/1000 Ethernet devices. Had some problems downloading the automatic firmware update, but eventually got it working, but you can also download them directly from Netgear's web site and install it using the web-based UI if you want. The UI is OK, but one thing that bugs me is that I can configure my extended WiFi network settings (ssid, password, etc), storage, etc in the UI maintenance screens, but I'm required to go through the "Smart Setup" wizard to configure or change any settings for the connection to the router, which seems pretty dumb, but it's not worth losing a star over. It does that for both the old and new firmware. One nice feature they seem to have added in the new firmware is the ability to configure whether you want to extend the new wireless network(s) to use 25%, 50%, 75%, or 100% power for your new extended network ssid(s).
WARNING: There are numerous reports of some users getting dramatically reduced performance after upgrading the firmware to 1.0.3.68_1.1.104 (from 1.0.1.60_1.1.98) so I recommend configuring the device first for maximum performance, after which you can upgrade the firmware and see if performance is affected, since it will keep all your configuration settings. If the performance does drop after the firmware upgrade, it allows you to install the older firmware version (which you can download from Netgear). For me, it actually seems like I got improved performance and link speed with the firmware upgrade, especially when using the Windows (Samba) file share I setup on my router for shared network storage. The shared network storage was kinda flaky and slow with the older firmware (but regular WiFi worked just fine), but it drastically improved and performs like a regular 1GB wired network file share with the new firmware. The firmware upgrade does include a completely different UI too, so don't be surprised.
Pros: Easy setup, (5) 1GB wired Ethernet ports, USB 2.0 shared storage, 2.4/5GHz channels, affordable, Can be used as a WiFi extender/bridge or just a wireless bridge.
Cons: Kinda Big, Antennas on side instead of top when in upright mode, UI required for FastLane configuration, Smart Setup required to configure router connection in UI, Wish the USB port was on the back with everything else instead of the front.
| Wireless Type | 802.11n, 802.11b, 802.11g, 802.11ac |
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