The new router 12 Sep, 2005
Remember my saying my poor old router popped its clogs? Well, my Netgear DG814 gave me over three years of use, pretty much always-on, so no complaints. I was happy to buy another Netgear unit, despite their poor support arrangements (a premium rate phone line to a bad call centre overseas). This is the thing I got myself: the Netgear DG834GT. It’s an integrated router / ADSL modem, as before, but this time it’s a wireless unit — with speeds right up to the new “Super G” standard. I don’t have much in the way of wireless gear at home, but Son of Stinky (my IBM Thinkpad) has a wireless card, and I hope to add some devices (specifically, something music-related) in the future.
The thing that really freaked me out when the router arrived is that whilst it looks very similar to my old one, it’s about a third of the size! It also comes with a sparkly white livery, so doesn’t look out of place tucked on the window sill behind Ethelred (my iMac G4). In tests, the wireless signal easily makes it from my study at the front of the house right through to the garden — no mean feat given that the house has some thick ole’ walls and a fair few rooms between those two locations.
VPN works just as well with this box as before, so working from home is still just fine. The router has quite a meaty firewall implementation together with all the other usual features: port forwarding, logging, support for ADSL 2, etc., etc. Overall, so far so good. One thing though: if you ever buy a Netgear box like this, be sure to update it to the latest firmware as soon as you can. For some reason Netgear tend to ship v1.0 firmware, and no-one likes v1.0 software eh! ;-)