Awesome new AP at home

By brendon on December 8th, 2009
0 responses

WNDR3700As a person that rents, I don’t have the option to use a patch panel and run CAT6 cables into each of my rooms. I am forced to live with ugly blue cables around the house or compete for spectrum with my neighbours using a wireless network. When I upgraded my MCE one of the components I added was a duel radio 802.11n (draft) PCI card with external antenna.

Once 802.11n was released as a certified standard, I started looking around for a new Access Point that would be able to support the HD video content I use around the house. Reading over the forums and reviews I came upon SmallNetBuilder and their review of the NetGear WNDR3700 Wireless GBit router.

The device ran duel radio’s 802.11abgn, had 4x GBit interfaces and wouldn’t break the bank. My current NetComm 3G18Wn was running 11n but only had 100Mbit ports and didn’t work properly with the iPhone. When I received the device I swapped it in place of the NetComm leaving all the wireless details the same.

  • GOOD: One of the funky features is when using Windows 7, WINDOWS takes you through a wizard to configure and secure the access point. Simply put in the PIN from the bottom of the device, next, next, finish and your AP is configured.
  • GOOD: All my existing devices connected without any hassles and transfers between the WHS and PC are much faster using the built-in GBit switch.
  • GOOD: There are buttons on the front of the AP which let you enable and disable the wireless plus unlock it for several seconds to let a new device associate.
  • BAD: My only problem with the device is that it expects to be the internet gateway for your network. If your lucky enough to have a CISCO 877 (with IPv6) as your DSL modem and firewall, the WNDR3700 cannot use a LAN address as the default gateway.

OPINION: Well the title says it all. If you don’t have a 11n access point at the moment, go pick up one of these. It associates at 300MBit and I get at least 80-90Mbit/s throughput over the wireless around home. It can stream WTV files to the MCE plus DVDs to the NetBook at the same time.