Netgear Dual Band Wireless N Review – WNDR3300 & WNDA3100

Speed, I need speed, and speed with coverage would be good. I was using a Netgear DG834G previously, and had a pretty good run out of it. I know Netgear kit ain’t the best, but it beats DLink in my experience, and is probably the biggest selling home and SOHO kit in Australia.

Now for 802.11g, MIMO will improve your coverage, but seeing as N is just around the corner, and uses MIMO as part of the draft standard, it made sense to just jump to 802.11n. My house is two storey, and getting good reliable coverage over both floors has proved difficult. I always get a signal, but not a good one, and for streaming my Vista Media Centre from my Home Server, I needed a good signal. I could have run Cat5, it’s what I had done in the past, but I figure, in 2008, I should be able to make all this new fangled stuff kinda come together smoothly.

Just released by Netgear and Linksys amongst others are new Dual Band draft N equipment, this runs in both the 5.8Ghz and 2.4GHz ranges. The argument being that the 5.8GHz range is far larger in frequency space, and far less utilised by other things that can interfere. Made sense to me, and at a small price premium, was worth jumping onto. Teamed with a new naked ADSL2+ service, I figured I would “embrace the future”.

The new Netgear model is WNDR3300 and the Linksys a WRT600N. I was more familiar with Netgear, it’s cheaper, and more easily available in Australia. I teamed it up with a set of Netgear USB WNDA3100 adapters. The unit supports QoS for my new Naked ADSL w/ VOIP service and has the widest range of features of the current netgear lineup.

8 Weeks after ordering, the kit finally turned up, with delays from Netgear getting it into the country. Looks like this stuff really is new – oh bugger, that’ll mean bugs.

It looks the piece, big, black, no antennas thanks to the secret metamaterial. The power pack is switch mode and small, and it comes with a few cables. Inital setup is manageable. The flashy lights on top are very very irritating, allow an extra $2 for a roll of black tape.

The first problem was the Router doesn’t have an integrated ADSL modem. Guess I should have read the specs a little better there. It’s almost impossible to purchase an ADSL modem only unit in Australia today, everything wants to route. Two routers in series = problems. You can convert the DG834G into a modem, but I had another home for mine, so I bought a DM111P to run as an Ethernet to ADSL2+ bridge. Getting the DM111P to be a modem means putting it into “RFC2684” mode, something not covered in any of the docs.  This way the DM111P handles the ADSL settings, but the WNDR3300 does the ADSL PPOE login with credentials etc. The downside is that you can’t see your ADSL line connection performance figures, and whilst the DM111P is in bridge mode, it doesn’t have an IP address, so you can’t get information off of it either. You have to configure your WNDR3300 to login with “Other” and not “PPTP” or “Telstra Bigpond”. Either way, I’m getting about 7Mbit.

Once running and configured I fired up the WNDA3100 units in my partners desktop and the Media Centre. Install went OK, although I hate the “app” type driver installs. I much prefer just having the driver and managing it through windows. I figured being new, that doing it the “right” way with the vendor, and having additional signal information would be useful. Longer term, once smoothed out, I’ll be uninstalling the netgear apps and just running the driver. That said, I have to figure out how to extract it, as it’s all packaged up, and not easy to get into. Finally, there is some sort of script it runs on every login, looks dodgy to me.

The coverage is good, and speed ok. Plenty of other reviews there, no need to re-cover that. Interestingly most of the clients could only see the 2.4Ghz signal. The 5.8 signal gets wiped out by my walls too quickly. As this review covers, you can only have DraftN on either 5.8 OR 2.4 at once, so I dropped the 5.8 signal and got the speed where I could. That pretty well negates the point of having Dual Band.

The comments I have had so far are below

1. Integrated WNDA3100 drivers mean more junk running
2. The pretty blue flashing ultrabright LEDS on the router are really really irritating, and there is no “off” option. (Update – press the dome over the lights – they turn off)
3. The router firmware is very flaky. It drops wireless signal every so often. (Seems better now)
4. The WNDA3100 drivers are less than ideal – more work needed here to improve performance.
5. My 802.11a/b/g laptop only wanted to see the 5.8 signal, not the 2.4, until I turned off the 5.8 on the router totally.
6. My HP printer wouldn’t work with WPA2, I had to turn on WPA/WPA2 compatibility mode.
7. If running in 2.4/5.8 Dual band mode, you get the option to run two different SSID’s. If you run the same one, your client can be confused as to which one to use. There is no guidance I have found on this function anywhere, and I’m still confused. Caused me some grief, until I made them different, at which stage the WPS auto config function stops working properly.
8. My Outlook w/ RPC over HTTP refused to work until I upgraded to the Beta firmware. (Fixed now)
9. Netgear has a Beta program going for firmware and some decent forums
10. There is discussion of other USB NIC vendors with the same Atheros chipset having performance issues.
11. The modem and power adapters all produce a bit of heat, meaning they are not particularly efficient. I am trying to cut my power use.
12. The DM111P comes with an old style power brick, whereas the WNDR3300 has a much smaller and more efficient switch mode power adapter. C’mon Netgear, catch up.
13. Coverage is much better
14. Speed is much better
15. No driver support for the WNDA3100 and Server 2003. I haven’t done video tests yet until I get a NIC for the server.

Next time I think I would consider the DG834N with the integrated modem, unless I had spectrum issues, possibly in densely populated areas.

Update (31/07/08)
I have updated to the latest release firmware – this has helped the stability significantly. Coverage is still ok, but not excellent. Primarily, I still can’t reliably watch DivX/XVid movies on my Vista Media Centre PC from my Windows Home Server. They play, but often judders and stall. The signal strength an quality are about 70% – but it still doesn’t cope. I think I’ll have to run Cat5 to the Media Centre after all. The Home Server is already running Cat 5 to the WNDR3300 – that is a requirement of WHS.  My house is two storey timber and no too huge. Due to placement, some transmission paths are less than ideal – high angle to the walls / floors increasing apparent depth.

 
Router

Router w/ VOIP adapter from Internode

 
Router, VOIP & ADSL Modem

WNDA3100

UPDATE:
I have decided to ditch the WNDR3300 and replace is with *something* else. I ahve gone through 5 versions of the firmware since I bought it. The 5.8Ghz is a waste of time, it has very poor penetration. www.smallnetbuilder.com shows average-poor wireless performacne in comparison from other devices. THe unit was replaced under warranty a couple of weeks ago when the QoS rules would not remain set to custom.

 The final deal breaker was my VOIP phone dropouts. I have an OPEN networks VOIP ATA behind the router, and frequently get “one way voice” on a call. I put this down to VOIP issues. Whilst the router was away under warranty I used my old DG834G – and had NO call dropouts. It doesn’t even have QoS and the call quality was better. As soon as the WNDR3300 went back in – dropouts came back. It’s going to be replaced, this time with somethign with an integrated ADSL modem.

I would not recommend this device.