Netgear DG834Gv2
I bought this combined ADSL modem and wireless 54g access point primarily because it looked nice and was quite cheap but am now regretting it. Worked ok at first, achieving some good file transfer times using windows and linux on my Tecra M5 which has an intel pro wireless 3945.
Then I started getting slowdowns. I tried turning off encryption and changing channels but nothing helped. My home is next to several offices and there are 6 wireless APs within range so thought this might just be congestion. I didn’t have this problem with my trusty old Buffalo AP though so something must be up.
I thought perhaps there was a compatibilty issue between my laptops wireless network card and the Netgear so I tried using the bundled USB dongle. The connection strength rose and file transfer times improved, but the difference was not massive and did not explain the huge random slowdowns that would occur.
I noticed that the ping times from my laptop to the Netgear were unbelievably bad – ranging wildly from a few ms to 8000ms! I moved right next to the AP and saw it settle down to 10ms, but even there it started jumping around up to 300ms and back!
I upgraded the firmware to version 3 and then…hey presto…I couldn’t even get an ADSL sync! I tried rebooting using the Netgear web console and doing several cold restarts to no avail: no internet.
I then connected to the Netgear using an ethernet cable and got a very scary result: ping times of 200ms! There was a serious hardware problem with this router. I had assumed it was a wireless problem (as wireless networks as everyone knows can be quite flakey, at least during initial tuning) but it now appeared to be much more general hardware problem inside the Netgear.
This Netgear product appears to have serious issues so I’ve ditched it. I have since read some bad reports about it in forums so mine might not be a one-off. Note that there is a newer v3 version of this product which may or may not be fixed. Personally I wouldn’t risk it.