Full Circle Magazine FR

Over the past couple of months I noticed our Internet connection appeared to be slowing down. Network games were okay, but downloads trudged along at around 100 kb/s, and our tablets and phones were having great difficulty watching streaming video. After a bit of help from our ISP, I narrowed the problem down to our router. Having just returned from holiday, our budget was limited to under $100. In the past I’ve owned routers by Netgear, Linksys, and D-Link, and, while our Linksys router served us well for a couple of years, our Netgear also worked very well. There were 10 routers that fit in that range up for consideration. Of those routers I excluded the D-Link routers because the couple I’ve owned in the past both ended up dropping wireless connections frequently after only a few months of use. Of the remaining routers, only the routers priced around $100 had gigabit ports, and, since we already have a gigabit switch, I eliminated them. To judge the remaining routers, I went online and looked at consumer ratings on several different sites. The router I chose, the Netgear N300, was also the second least expensive at $39. While this wasn’t a primary concern, it was a nice bonus. Netgear makes at least a couple of routers under the banner N300 – the WNR2000 and the WNR3500L. The WNR3500L is a reasonably priced gigabit router sold on Amazon for $60. This article covers the WNR2000 – a non-gigabit wireless N router. Had my local store carried the Amazon N300 router, I might have bought it, but I needed a router quickly. Opening the box I was surprised the first thing I saw was a printed copy of GPLv3 and GPLv2 license. This really isn’t that surprising this day and age since a lot of routers use some form of *NIX. The box came with a power cable, the WNR2000v3 router, and a short yellow ethernet cable. Configuration turned out to be a bit of a pain, the router’s “genie” software mis-detected our connection as a PPTP connection rather than a PPPoE connection. Having owned a couple of Netgear routers before, I knew they tend to use 10.0.0.1 instead of 192.168.0.1 as an address. Opening a terminal and typing ifconfig confirmed the router had assigned my notebook an address in the 10.0.0.x range. I corrected the router setup by going to the Basic > Internet tab, selecting PPPoE from the Internet Service provider tab, and then entering my details. The router interface is clean, but somewhat unresponsive, likely due to Netgear’s “genie-ing” the web interface. According to this article on the OpenWRT website http://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/netgear/wnr2000, version 3 of the WNR2000 runs OpenWRT (version 1 and 2 do not). If this is true, Netgear has gussied it up to look like something else and stuck the genie moniker on it. As I mentioned earlier the WNR2000 is a wireless N router, it bonds a couple of channels together to attain a theoretical maximum of 300 Mbps. The first real test was streaming video to our family tablet. I didn’t hear any of the usual complaints about Internet speed from family, so the WNR2000 appeared to have at least fixed that problem. Netgear also provides a free genie app for iOS and Android devices. I tried the genie app on our tablet but was unsuccessful logging in to our router using the password I created or the default “password” password suggested by the app. Oddly enough, the My Media section of the genie app did work – allowing us to stream video from our XBMC machine to our tablet. If you own an iPad, you’ll appreciate this feature since, in my experience, most of the iOS upnp applications are crippled until purchase. Sadly, all of the genie apps except the upnp media app, and the QR barcode reader on the page after, wouldn’t work without logging in to the router. As expected, the BASIC tab of the router is a really dumbed down interface that doesn’t allow a lot of control. The ADVANCED tab contains more of the options you’d expect on a router, Internet setup, wireless setup, LAN setup, Quality of Service rules, parental controls, site blocking, and more. One of the features I look for is the ability to set up DHCP reservations based on MAC address, a feature under the Advanced > Setup > LAN setup section. The Advanced > Advanced Setup > Wireless Settings let you turn on and off the internal wireless antenna both completely and by schedule, and create a wireless access list. The WNR2000 can also act as a wireless access point. This feature lets you run a cable from the standard ethernet port on a router to the WAN port on a WNR2000 and use it as the access point. The WNR2000 can also act as a wireless repeater, effectively boosting the wireless signal in a different room. Port forwarding and triggering are also supported under the Advanced Setup section. I’ve used port forwarding in the past to open up ports and allow traffic to come through for a game server I ran. Universal Plug and Play, UPnP, is enabled on a lot of routers by default, I turned it off on the WNR2000v3. Having UPnP enabled is just begging to be hacked, and judging by the number of DoS attacks on high ports – 15 (one of which appears to be legitimate traffic) in 1 day, it’s a good thing I turned it off. Disabling UPnP does not prevent upnp devices on the local LAN from functioning correctly. Our iPad and Android phones were all able to correctly connect and stream to and from our XBMC media center with UPnP disabled on the router (this may have been why the iPad genie app refused to log in correctly, but I’d rather be safe and not use them than deal with a hacked server). As I’ve hinted above, the WNR2000v3 keeps some logs. There isn’t a fancy graph of traffic like on the tomato-hacked Linksys router we used to own, but you can set up the WNR2000v3 to send out email notifications of the logs, a handy feature to have if you’re away and want to monitor your router from your phone. Netgear makes several routers in the N*series, the top end using the new 802.11ac standard which operates on the less busy 5GHz band (the WNR2000v3 operates on the 2.4GHz band). At the higher end, the routers claim larger wireless coverage, better video streaming, and signal interference avoidance. With over 60 wireless signals available nearby, our N300 (WNR2000v3 model) has been performing well - though we’re covering only roughly 1000 square feet. The N300 isn’t the most feature-rich router on the market, but it’s a sight better than other routers I’ve tried, and at about half the cost of routers that have failed on us.