Why buy Netgear N600 Wireless Dual Band Router?
When it comes to choosing a new Router, there are a lot of options to weigh out. 10/100 or Gigabit? 802.11a/b/g or n? Dual band? What about USB network storage? Well, it's been a while since I had to try answer those questions but when I finally did, I ended up purchasing the Netgear N600 Dual Band router. How did it stack up to my old Linksys? Read on to find out.
Pressure for change
I was very fond of my Linksys with SRX200 (WRT54GX2), but it was having some serious issues maintaining a healthy wireless network. I probably could've spent some time troubleshooting exactly why, but the router was ~5 years old and I knew that I wanted to try out 802.11n technology with some of my other new devices.
Setup
Setup was a breeze. The N600 is pretty easy to get going, even if you're only used to Linksys (or I presume any other brand) router. Visit the router's url and start the wizard. It was that simple. Well, i did have to restart my modem for it to pick DHCP.
Features
The Netgear N600 packs some pretty useful features. One of my favorite is the easy-to-setup USB network storage. While I did have difficulty in setting up permission and configuring additional folders, My Toshiba Passport installed almost immediately and was very easy to rename and connect with.
The N600 Dual Band Experience
I must say, the dual band feature is awesome. I have one band setup to handle all of my 2.4 Ghz WiFi traffic and the second setup to handle all of the 5 Ghz WiFi traffic. This means that supported 802.11n devices will enjoy a nice 2x throughput bump. This includes the Acer Iconia tablet.
Conclusion
After 3 weeks of using the Netgear N600 Router, I must say that I'm happy with my purchase. It ended up being on sale anyway which helped satisfy the transaction. At the time, the Netgear N600 Wireless Router at Best Buy was only $70. There was a gigabit flavor, but I couldn't justify it for the price bump as I'm not even getting gigabit from Comcast.
