When your broadband connection goes down you feel completely helpless don’t you? Or is that just me? Well, my ADSL router died a few weeks ago and I needed to get it back up and running as soon as possible. I found an old Siemens router in the garage from when I used Tiscali so I reconfigured this, plugged it in and all was well. For a week or two. Then that router died too with an almost identical fault – power light would come on, but it would never boot. Grrr, I had a few choices – order a new one online (er, how?) or go to an actual shop thing and buy one. My local PC World / Currys / Comet / Tesco turned out to be less than useful unless I had over £70 to burn and keeping in mind that BT Infinity will be rearing its head within the next couple of months I was reluctant to spend much given that I’ll need new hardware anyway when I sign up to that. Thankfully Argos rescued me, and the Netgear DGN1000 was purchased.
The router is shiny and black with wall mountable screw holes on the back which is always a nice touch… if it was going to be a permanent installation I’d have used these but in the interest of keeping my walls clean I have propped it precariously in the corner of my lounge instead so as my 2-year-old son can ‘test’ it fully. Installation of the router was very straight forward – I’ve used a lot of Netgear ADSL routers over the years, mainly the DG834G varieties and the interface in the DGN1000 is more or less the same. The router automatically detected the line parameters and prompted me for my credentials which were duly supplied… and there we are, all connected! Of course I had to make a number of changes to default configuration to align it with my existing network infrastructure: the LAN addressing had to be changed to 192.168.1.0/24 from 192.168.0.0/24 and of course this means re-addressing the router to 192.168.1.1 – a very easy task; the DHCP scope needed to be adjusted in a similar manner, and limited to fewer addresses which prevents overlap with the statics on my LAN; and a few inbound traffic rules needed to be added forwarding to my server for remote access. All this was easy to do and quite intuitive, but the most important thing was the Wi-Fi configuration. Now, I don’t make use of Wi-Fi on my router because I have a dedicated access point elsewhere in the house, so I usually disable it straight away. This time I decided to test it out specifically for this review. Netgear, quite stupidly in my opinion, enable Wi-Fi on their routers out of the box. Not only do they enable them, but they give them a standard SSID of NETGEAR and turn off all encryption leaving the router completely open. The DGN1000 includes Wireless-N support across a single radio meaning it can theoretically support up to 150Mbps. More expensive models sport double antennae meaning they can go up to 300Mbps if you need that kind of bandwidth. After locking down the configuration to WPA2-AES I gave the wireless connection a good hammering. Compared to my existing 802.11g network which normally connected at around 40Mbps, the 802.11n access point gave me connection speeds of 64Mbps. Of course in real life this doesn’t necessarily mean anything, but transfer speeds to my server generally felt a little nippier by comparison although I didn’t bother with anything scientific. If I ever get hold of a 300Mbps access point then I’ll do some proper playing for you.
I do have a couple of beefs with the router. Firstly, connection speeds are a little lower than my late Huawai router, syncing at around 3.8Mbps instead of the previous 4.5Mbps but I’m not noticing the difference really – I’m getting enough to stream BBC iPlayer in high quality. My second beef concerns the manner in which it deals with internal requests to services which are hosted internally to the LAN, but using an Internet facing DNS name / IP address. Not following me? Well, my Windows Home Server sits on my LAN, and if I wish to connect to the server when I’m out and about on someone else’s Internet connection, I simply open a web browser, type in the special secret URL associated with my server, and the web browser goes away and hits my router at home, which port forwards me through on TCP 80 to my server inside my LAN. All fine and dandy, but what if I’m sitting at home on my LAN and I do the same thing – you’d think that the router should be able to understand that it is actually supposed to port forward you to a specific host on your LAN, but what it actually does is ignore its ruleset and connect you straight to the internal web interface of the router. I haven’t had this issue since I first made use of a Netgear DG834G v1 many years ago and even then the problem was resolved after a few months via a firmware update. Why Netgear have allowed this problem to creep back in I’m not sure but I’ll update this review if it gets fixed.
Today was Talk talk day. Our phone and broadband services have now been migrated over to Talk talk saving us around £15 a month hopefully. The original download speed estimate they gave us was 2Mb, which was revised to 1Mb a week later in a letter they sent us. Luckily the router has synced just short of 4Mb so I expect to get 3.5Mb once it settles down. There is a 40GB download limit per month so I’ll be keeping my eye on that – I reckon I’ll get pretty close if not hit that but it’s only an extra £4 a month to double the limit. We’ll also get free local calls any time and free evening and weekend calls too. With BT we were paying for unlimited calls any time which wasn’t really being used – our bill consisted of mainly mobile phone calls.
