Customer Reviews

Netgear WGU624 Double 108 Mbps Wireless A+G Router

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(12)

 

 

I am a very experienced information technology professional. I wanted to upgrade my old SMC 7004 since my 13 year old decided to step on it and break off one of the antenna stalks. I went for this beauty because of specs and looks.

I downloaded the latest firmware (.11) and flashed it before doing anything else.

I did not have any problem configuring it since the browser interface is pretty straight forward. I have PPPoE with Verizon DSL and use 64 bit WEP since I don't want to have to configure all my wireless bridges around the house. I had it up and running in less than 5 minutes and I had Internet connectivity as well as brand new DHCP leases on every laptop and over every wireless bridge except for one laptop still running an old SMC2635W PCMCIA 11b card. The throughput was pretty decent for the 11b/g side and phenomenal on the 11a side. It gave a very strong signal on my back porch, way better than the 7004.

This euphoria lasted about 20 minutes. Since then, it has decided to drop connection to the Internet, drop DHCP, drop connectivity and behave in a very erratic manner.

I have been resetting it at least once every few hours for the last three days. I am getting so frustrated that I want to open the window and chuck it out.

Needless to say It is going back today.

Shame on you Netgear.

**Update at the bottom**

I must admit this is the worse networking product I've seen, and I don't know how Netgear product QA could have passed this for sales.

There are several major issues with this product:

1. It stops sending beacons on both radios on a random basis. This causes wireless connectivity to drop. The only way to solve the issue is to reboot the router. I used a wireless sniffer to see if the router was sending out beacons, and it wasn't.
2. WAN connectivity drops frequently. The router recovers by itself, but I can lose WAN connectivity up to over a minute and this problem can happen quite often. I use my VoWLAN application all the time and my calls always drop. When WAN connectivity is not available, I have no problem pinging the router or accessing the router's config page.

Then, I found Netgear techsupport to be totally hopeless. My support calls always end up somewhere in India. Although the techsupport technicians were always polite, their lack of ANY networking and 802.11 skills proved them to be useless. They could offer nothing other than instructions to reconfig the router and a case number. They didn't know what I was talking about when I told them the router stopped sending beacons, and of course they wouldn't have an idea about the difference between TKIP and AES when I asked them if the key resets were causing the router to freeze. Also, there is no way to escalate the case to anyone. The techsupport person asked me to return the router.

Overall, I found this to be an extremely unpleasant experience. I have other Netgear products that are more simple in design and I never ran into issues like this. This is very unfortunate as I thought Netgear has good products.

One last note, it doesn't matter what code you put on the router. I tried everyone of them, and none of them solved my issues.

**Update** -- I ran some research on this product and found a D-Link router using the same WLAN chipset is also suffering from the same problems. Is it a coincidence? Or is there a problem with the underlying Atheros chipset?

This would be a great device if it would keep working for over a couple hours. It drops the wireless or Internet or both connections multiple times daily. Upgrading to the latest (8 month old) firmware, if anything, worsened the problem.

Search Google - This is a very common problem that Netgear doesn't seem to have addressed.

I am surprised this product hasn't been discontinued.

I have to agree with most reviewers here, this product and all other Netgear products stink. The WGU624 I have has several probems:

1. Many people complain that this product needs constant rebooting. This is because if your home's power network has unstable voltage, it will make the WGU624's wireless network to go down (interestingly, any computers connected to it via wired LAN will still work). So basically, whenever the dehumidifyer turned on or off, or when someone used a vacuum cleaner in the same room, or the air conditioner in the house turns on, the wireless router had to be rebooted. I had to shell out another $30 to buy an automatic voltage regulator so I could stop worrying about rebooting it.

2. This thing keeps assigning conflicting IP addresses to different computers, both on the wired and wireless network. That get's pretty annoying, especially when I add a new computer or network device.

3. The actual wireless range is at most half of that advertised. I have it located in the kitchen, which is right next to my backyard, and it barely covers 1/3 of the backyard. It has especially poor performance if the signal has to travel through a wall or floor/ceiling.

4. It has a lot of trouble connecting to Netgear's WG111U wireless USB adapter, which is the adapter that is supposed to go with this router. The non-Netgear wireless adapter in my tablet PC works beautifully with no problems, so it is really weird that the WG111U would have problems connecting with the WGU624.

Overall, I have to say I am extremely disappointed in Netgear. Not only do their products fail to deliver, but their website and support aren't any good either. I would steer clear of anything with the Netgear name on it, at least until they get their act together. I have had many issues with Linksys products in the past too, so I guess next time I try to set up a wireless network I will try either D-Link or Belkin.

This product was very difficult to setup. I had to run the web based setup over and over again, in between shutting down my computer and DSL modem several times in sequence. I finally had to call their tech. support line (based offshore, hardly spoke English well). And when I was eventually able to get connectivity through this router, my speed seemed slower than before and some images on certain websites refused to load in my web browser. I returned this Netgear back to the store the next day because by that time my connection kept breaking off.

What happened? I thought Netgear was supposed to be a good brand. Based on this product, I would never buy another Netgear again. Terrible product, terrible reliability. You could and would do better with a Linksys or D-Link router instead.

This product is great. Even if there is a lot of people who seem upset about it, I say a lot of good things!

The setup is hard, but after check on the net (via my modem not the routeur, I find some explanation for the setup (just check netgear website and seach the tutorial), in 15 min, everything was working.

I now have a double network : one 108Mbps for my self and a few friends, one 54 Mbps for the others friends. And it works, even sharing files from/to a 54Mbps connection/108Mbps connection.

Good material.

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.

I put the router in place and had it working in 5 minutes. We had to replace our current router when it quit allowing the playstation to pass through it. No idea what happened there. But my husband played Socom 3 on his playstation from 7pm until 4am with no problems. I haven't had any issues with it dropping the connection.

4/4/2006 - I've had the router for a few months now, and it's dropping packets like crazy. Can't even play the playstation through it anymore, it's useless!

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.

I've had this router for a year or so, and I keep it very busy. Those that have posted bad reviews may have known what they were doing, but your success with this or any wi-fi router depends a bit on the compatibility with the wireless cards you are using. In my case, I found out the chipset in this router is Atheros, so I bought a wireless card with that same chipset, an 802.11a/b/g combo card. The same chipset in the card and the router means I get rock-solid connectivity, and it NEVER drops. This is the first "good" wireless connection I've had, and I've tried several miniPCI and PC cards (miniPCI) with several different routers (Linksys, D-Link, netgear). Having 802.11a is great - the speed and range is plenty adequate for my needs (all over the house and on the patio), and I can use 2.4GHz phones and they wont interfere with the network (802.11b/g uses 2.4GHz range and can cause decreased range/speed). The Netgear WGU624 does a great job!