Review: Netgear Rangemax WNDR3700 Dual Band Wireless-N Gigabit Router

Fast and Easy - Highly Recommended!, October 7, 2009


The Netgear Rangemax WNDR3700 Dual Band Wireless-N Gigabit Router is a well made and good looking feature rich device. It was also amazingly easy to install and setup using the included utility that provided step-by-step animated instructions. The process was very straight forward and I was able to have the Netgear router up and running in less than 10 minutes, seamlessly replacing my aging Linksys wireless router.

We have a lot of networked devices in our shop, including 3 wired PCs, 3 wireless laptops (two 802.11g and one "N"), a Linksys hub, 2 wired laser printers, and 1 wireless (802.11g) All-In-One printer. In addition we also hold training and workshops that run over several days and our customers often wanted to jump on our wireless network, something which we often allowed by giving them our WEP Key, but unfortunately that also gave them access to our network devices. The WNDT3700 has a lot of advanced features that made significant improvements to my network performance and security, including:

+ 4 Gigabit Ethernet Ports - Each port can auto "downspeed" to as well to support older Ethernet cards.

+ Dual Band Wireless - Supports "legacy" 802.11a,g and the newer "N" (very fast indeed) with much better range than my Linksys router.

+ Support for Wireless Guest Network - Easy to setup and control access, we use this as a courtesy to our customers in our shop when we hold classes and only give them access out to the Internet, protecting our internal network.

+ USB Drive Support - Works very well! We now have a networked 2TB RAID drive that is accessible from all of our shop PCs, it was easy to setup using the utility included on the CD that helps you map the drive. We now store all of our critical files and photos on the network drive. No complaints at all on the speed and performance with retrieving even the largest files.

+ Broadband Usage Meter - Useful to monitor your traffic volume to\from your ISP, which is important if you push a lot of multimedia files over a provider that has a monthly usage cap (like Comcast). This seems to be fairly accurate from my casual observations.

There are a few features that I don't expect to use (QoS, WPS, etc) but all of the functions I configured worked correctly right out of the box, which is perhaps a first for me and a welcome change over previous network device installations.

Overall, I am very pleased with the ease of use and performance of this wireless router! Highly Recommended!

5/5 Stars

MSRP: $189.99
Amazon: $159.99

My Amazon Review: Netgear WNDR3700

Note: I was given this to review as part of the Amazon Vine program