SmallNetBuilder

i have one of these defective units and am trashing it after only a few months of useage. There is no customer support

Lets get one thing straight right away: review sites are letting Netgear get away with murder when they mention in passing how the 5.0 GHz signal drops with distance. The signal doesn't "drop with distance", it has a super short range and it can't get to the other end of the house.

Here are some results I gathered, all in feet (approximate) and Mbps (mega BITS per second) and for download rate only.

Bandwidth test on Samsung Galaxy S Android phone (802.1g):
Distance (f): bitrate (Mbps)
0 : 10
10 : 9
20 : 9
adjacent room (40) : 7.5
adjacent room (60) : 6
adjacent room (100) : 1
downstairs (~50-150) : 0-10
basement: (100-200) : 0-6

In regular g mode (2.1 GHz) it's not that bad. In theory u could just put it in the center of the level, and it will get to every room. However, it has an easier time getting through floors, which are thin and unobstructed, than it does going through multiple walls and cupboards which, unfortunately, surround most rooms. Therefore, the signal strength directly below my room all the way to the basement (30 feet away) was better than the next room 20 feet from mine. It really works in a 50 feet radius, and after that, it's next to useless for things like streaming video. Now the same experiments but for the big daddy, N (5.0 GHz)

Bandwidth test on Macbook Pro (802.1N)
Distance (f): bitrate (Mbps)
Wired : 18.5
0 : 18
10 : 17
20 : 17
adjacent room (40) : 7
adjacent room (42) : 6.5
adjacent room (44) : 13 (strangely enough)
adjacent room (50) : N/A
adjacent room (100) : N/A
downstairs (~50-150) : N/A-15
basement: (100-200) : N/A-9

The range is only 50 feet! After that I get ZERO signal. To reiterate, after 50 feet, the signal ceases to exist. That's exactly HALF the distance of 802.1g. On the lower levels, as long as I am directly below the router, the signal is excellent, otherwise it degrades exponentially with distance.

This router is best suited for people with a studio apartment. There's no way I can get my TV downstairs to stream HD video from my laptop upstairs. Either I'm going to set up ethernet cables all throughout my house, or I'm going to buy 8 Airport extremes and start propagating the signal. I can't believe WiFi can't penetrate dry wall. For Shame!

Used to work fine now 66 Mbps cable is 3.5 Mbps for LAN, wireless is 20 Mbps. It's lost its configuration several times. The last frimware upgrade turned it into stinking pile of feces.

While I have not had any experience with 802.11n routers in the past, this particular router is acceptable. I have not had any major problems with the router on 2.4 ghz mode. However in 5 ghz mode, the transfer rate was far from impressive, even a few metres away compared to the 2.4 ghz mode without any barriers. So if you need two separate bands for your 802.11n devices and 802.11b/g devices, don't get this router.

Based on range, from two floors away, I can say that this router is better than my 802.11g (WRT54G), as I can write to a networked computer (using 802.11n adapter) at 2.04 MB/s and read at 3.20 MB/s which is about twice the rate of my old 802.11g router (router at bottom floor, other computer on first floor above and my computer on second floor above).

The router on occasion does stall and prevent internet access for all the computers for about 30 seconds once a week or so. I have not determined what the cause of it is.

The router is also capable of using the latest custom version of DD-WRT, however the transfer rates and range are somewhat diminished.

If I had known about the router's results, I would have probably purchased the Cisco E3000 instead.

I am using the WNDR3700 as a Access Point on my home network. I purchased it mostly because my wife's Dell laptop has always suffered poor wireless performance. I had been using either my trusted old WRT54G or an Apple Time Capsule for wireless access and could never get her laptop over ~900KB/s of throughput. Once I installed the WNDR37000 her laptop throughput went up to 3.25 MB/s on the 5 Gig band. Not awesome but good enough so all her stuff actually works properly.

My only complaint is time - this router fetches time via the WAN port and since I have nothing connected there the router date & time is way off. I tried forcing a default route to my internal gateway but the router complains that 0.0.0.0/0 is not a valid IP...

Overall though I would not hesitate to recommend this product.