Netgear ProSafe Router, 8-Port Switch, Integrated (FVS318G-200NAS)

The only reason I gave this product one star is that you have to give it at least one start. I would have given it zero starts if I could have. Being a previous Netgear firewall owner, and being extremely happy with the FVS338 I have had for almost seven years, I never gave a thought to reading the review of the FVS318G. That as a BIG mistake. I own a Netgear FVS338 firewall which I've had for just under seven years. It's been great. Easy to set up and reliable. But it's LAN-to-WAN throughput is only 90 Mbps. This was fine when I bought it and my Internet connection was just 25 Mbps. Comcast later doubled that to 50 Mbps (for free, no less!) and later Comcast doubled it again to 100 Mbps (again, for free!). I couldn't take advantage of my full Internet connection speed, but 90 Mbps was close enough to 100 Mbps and I was happy. Recently I upgraded my Comcast service, which doubled my Internet speed to 200 Mbps. As an aside, the upgrade gave me 40+ more channels and doubled my Internet speed, all for $20 a month LESS than I'd been paying! So it was time for a firewall with a higher LAN-to-WAN throughput. Having had such a great experience with my Netgear FVS338, naturally I went back to see what they had to offer. This FVS318G has a LAN-to-WAN throughput of 250 Mbps. It did everything the FVS338 did, so I ordered one. But I was to be greatly disappointed. Before ever connecting the FVS318G to the Internet, I connected it to my PC and changed the default admin password from "password" to a string of 32 random letters and numbers. Believe it or now, you cannot use special characters in passwords with the FVS318G. At least not the hyphen and the exclamation point. I gave up guessing after that. After changing the password, I was unable to log in. It said my password was invalid. It can't be. I did a copy and paste when I changed it and copied and pasted the same password when I logged in. I had to do a hard reset back to the factory default setting. And, BTW, the reference manual does not match the device! That made for lots of fun trying to figure out how to reset the FVS318G, but I got it done. This time I used the 20 character string of random letters and number for the admin password and that worked. I was able to log in using that password. The FVS338 will apparently not accept a password of 32 characters. But no error message was displayed. It just happily accepted my too long password. I only had to make a few minor configuration changes and I was ready to swap out my old FVS338 for my new FVS318G. A quick check with speedtest.net showed I was getting 135 Mbps download from one site. Other test sites varied from 50 to 80 Mbps. That's certainly expected since you never know what traffic there is between you and any given test site. All seemed well. That feeling didn't last long. After about ten minutes I was unable to reach any Web site. We have three computers in the house and all three had the same problem. I power cycled the FVS318G and that corrected the problem. But about ten minutes later the same thing happened. Another power cycle and we're back in business. Ten minutes later, the same thing happened. That's it. Back in the box and back to Amazon. My trusty FVS338 is back in service. The FVS318G was only $103. I thought that was a great price, but I guess you get what you pay for. So I'll be shopping for a new brand of firewall.

This works great as a VPN router. Some times you need to turn off the default setting for "Block UDP Flood Protection" otherwise you can have some slow internet connections. Turn Off Default LAN protection UDP Flood Setting. This video explains the issue we had and how to resolve it. ://youtu.be/o3anFZuNCKE -Turn Off Default LAN protection UDP Flood Setting

I really like this product. It works well and has been reliable. The only thing I don't like about it is the fact that I had to buy it in the first place. NetGear does not do a good job of advertising the true limiting factor of this device. LEARN FROM MY IGNORANCE! I originally bought a NetGear ProSafe VPN Firewall FSV318G (v1, although I didn't know it at the time) for home use. WAN and LAN ports speeds are clearly advertised on the box: 10/100/1000 Mbps for both. I mistakenly thought port speeds were the speed at which the device as a whole could handle - in this case up to 1000Mbps. However, the product description, box, website, etc., DOES NOT advertise the true limiting factor of this device: WAN to LAN throughput. Think of WAN as "how fast my internet coming into this router" and LAN as "how fast my internet coming out of this router". You may have wide open pipes for your WAN and LAN ports, but if the pipe connecting them is a soda straw, you're ethernet speed downstream of this router will never come close to your port speeds. My first purchase was a FSV318G v1. The WAN to LAN throughput was not advertised on the Amazon page, product description, or even on the box. I discovered too late that the device WAN to LAN throughput was limited to 15Mbps. So even if only one computer is using the internet, the max it'll get is 15Mbps. Now share that 15Mbps between up to 8 different devices... This -200NAS (or v2) device has 250Mbps max WAN-TO-LAN. Again, not advertised on the box (although that 10/100/1000 Mbps port speed still is), website, etc. I only found it through internet searches and in the product Q&A section in the Amazon posting.

This review is based on installation and configuration. The Netgear router replaced an older D-Link that was getting overloaded due to our increasing number of household network devices. The box itself feels sturdy and comes with wall mounting hardware. The initial configuration went smoothly with a browser based UI. The UI response seemed a little sluggish at times but was otherwise ok. Once I had all the settings programmed, the device would partially lock up with a dead DHCP server, no WAN access, and no admin access through the browser. Devices on my intranet that received IP addresses continued to have connectivity between each other. After resetting the box everything would work for 10-15 min before locking up again. After four hours of troubleshooting, I finally stopped the lockups by resetting the box back to factory defaults, updating the firmware, then re-entering all my setup information. Hey Netgear, why don't you beef up your SW QA dept. It's obviously ineffective because you released a product that could not perform one of its basic functions due to SW bugs. So here you get two stars.

good

great product