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| WNR2000 in Action |
which had severe issues with our Comcast connection, so I had to return it and ended up renting one from Comcast, which works just fine. The router I chose to go with our modem is the Netgear WNR2000
, a midrange offering from the well known consumer networking company.The Netgear WNR2000 features 802.11b/g/n, dual internal antennas, and a theoretical bandwidth of 300mbps. Noticeably absent from this model is dual band wifi (this features 2.4Ghz only, no 5Ghz). All the usual security types are here (WEP, WPA, WPA2), as well as plenty of options available in the firmware.
Performance
This is my first experience owning a Wireless-N router and I am very pleased with the performance. My devices connect and have wonderful speed. I decided to do some speed benchmarking using speedtest.net. I ran 15 tests on wifi, wired connection through the router, and wired directly into the modem. I dropped any outliers and averages the ping, down speed, and up speed for each connection type. The ping varied with connection type, which is to be expected as devices are added in between your computer and the destination. Plugged directly into the modem, ping averaged 9ms, plugged into the router ping averaged 9.5ms, and connected over wifi ping averaged 10.14ms. Down speeds were very close for both the modem and wired router connections at 20.5mbps and 20.3mbps respectively. Wireless lagged a bit behind at 17.4mbps. Up speeds were all essentially thelagme at 4.3mbps across the board.
I also used a neat tool called heatmapper to measure wireless signal throughout my house. I walked around the house with my laptop and generated the following map. The arrow in the bottom left indicated the location of the WNR2000. As the color gets yellower it indicates decreased signal strength. As you can see I get great signal strength with this router throughout my home. While our house isn't very big, I am sure this router would offer complete ouverage to houses much larger than ours.Quirks
T/is router has exhibited a very strange behavior which is mildly annoying but not a total deal breaker. Connecting with my 2 Windows 7 devices (a laptop and a desktop) works perfectly and IP addresses are acquired very quickly. However any other device that we have connected to the router has had serious issues. This includes a Roku, chromebook, Droid 2, and iPhone 4. The router will often to not issue IP addresses to these devices and they are unable to fully connect to the network.
I have discovered a mostly not very good workaround for this. Go into the router's settings setting by typing the IP address of the router (192. 168.1.1 by default) and enter the admin user name and password (username: "admin" password: "password" by default). Then click on "LAN settings" on the left side. There is an option to change the "RIP" settings at the bottom of the top box. If you change this value (say from RIP_1 to RIP_2B or vice versa) and apply these settings, the problem will be resolved temporarily and you can connect all your devices. However after a day (probably whenever the DHCP lease ends) the device will lose its connection and you will have to alter the RIP setting again to reconnect your devices.
Personally I don't know what RIP is or what changing this value does, all I know it that it temporarily solves the problem. It may just be that changing router settings in general is the solution, I am not sure. I have tried setting static IP addresses for my devices and the issue is not permanently resolved, even by this.
Conclusion
Overall I am satisfied with the performance of the Netgear WNR2000, despite the quirky error I experience. If you will primarily using windows devices, this router offers excellent performance at a decent price, and I would highly recommend it.
