Netgear WNR3500L-100NAS N300 Open-Source Gigabit WiFi Router (WNR3500Lv2), 128MB NAND and 128MB RAM, 480 MHz MIPS 74K Processor

I bought this router because of the price. The reviews were solid. This seemed to be the least expensive gigabit router with the best overall reviews. I have to say I agree. It comes out of the box with an older NetGear interface. Honestly though, once you get it set up, most people don't look back on it. I was afraid that it may be a bit of a pain to set up because of some reviews of the router on youtube and reviews of NetGear routers in general. I don't know what people were complaining about. Plug it in and press the WPS button and it works. The only other thing I had to do was restart my cable modem. Worked perfectly from the get go. I really like the guest network option. I will say the interface isn't as friendly looking as other brands. My only complaints would be more control over the guest network. That said, this is an open source router. If you want more control, you can easily load DD-WRT or Tomato on here. Once you do that, it is a control freak/tweakers fantasy come true. You can control just about every aspect that you would want to control, and several that you probably have no interest in controlling. Doing this is also pretty simple. Just a few steps, and you are off. Hardware wise, you may be better off getting the WNR3500Lv2 if you can get it at the same price because it has more internal antennae (8 vs. 3 in this model) and it has more memory (128flash/128ram vs 8flash/64ram in this model), and there is just as much support in the open source community for the v2 as there is this version. I've had very good luck with NetGear products. Last one I had never quit for 5 years, I just decided to upgrade. I can't say the same for Linksys or D-Link or Belkin - I have had to deal with & use in other locations (parents, friends, finace). They have not fared nearly as well.

Purchased this to replace an aging Linksys WRT54GS. It was bought on the merits that it was wireless-N capable, has a Gigabit switch in the back and (so-say) good range. The range is on par, if not a bit better than the 54GS in G mode at 2.4GHz so that suits me fine for now. I've yet to try it in N mode as I have a couple legacy computers which don't have the firmware to support WPA-2, so it's running WPA which doesn't have N support. It has true internal/external NAT mapping as well, which is useful to be able to address multiple web-serving devices from the outside Internet. It works well. So far has worked flawlessly- connected to WAN via a DSL modem, it has hardwired an old desktop machine acting as a web/media server, a Nintendo Wii, a Playstation 3 (upnp works properly on it, by the way), and wirelessly a desktop running Ubuntu, several laptops and the old WRT54GS, re-flashed with Tomato running as a wireless bridge to an Xbox 360 in another room. Haven't tried the WPS but having used similar Netgear products I'm sure it'll work- my Win7 laptop recognized the WPS function and gave the option to use it instead of the passkey. Great for easy setup, people unfamiliar with computers especially. Can't argue the price, although do note that the factory refurbished models do not ship with any software, just a paper saying to go to Netgear's website for further assistance. Although it is easy to set up if you've done a few before, you'll have to get online to download the manual.

I bought this router to replace my trusty wrt54g with tomato open source custom firmware running on it. Great router, but a bit aged, even with the enhancements of tomato. Reasons I used tomato: 1. Static dhcp (a.k.a. IP Reservation) 2. Improved throughput 3. Better control over port forwarding 4. Content filtering 5. QOS I selected the WNR3500L because I wanted a nice high performance router that is compatible with tomato and cheap (wanted that wireless N, gigabit, and faster throughput but didn't want to shell out a lot of money for a router). There aren't that many routers compatible with tomato: look to Asus RT-N66U (but not the N56U) if you want one better than this one, at many times the price. Anyway this router is among the handful that are really high performance and support the firmware I wanted. There are two versions of the WNR3500L. They use a different chipset. The version two has a faster chip and significantly more flash memory (and RAM). But the overall performance apparently isn't all that different overall between the two versions. Anyway, pretty much everywhere you look you will be getting version two. But this refurbished one is version one. Some people prefer version one because it is in some sense more compatible with tomato (or was...probably it just had a head start). Personally I would have preferred version 2. No big deal, though. They are very similar machines. Anyway, I plugged this router in to get it ready for the tomato install. It worked right off the bat with no configuration. Not a big surprise. But then I took a minute to look through the options in the firmware. IP reservation? Check. Convenient and flexible port forwarding? Check. Sophisticated QOS? Apparently, haven't tried it yet. It looks good, though. Content filtering? Also apparently. IPV6? Yup. Basically, this router appears to have all the features I want in the stock firmware. I'm getting great wireless N speeds, great connection speeds, got all my network IP's reserve, got some ports forwarded. Really, I'm not seeing a reason to install tomato. Maybe the days when custom firmware really added a ton to your router functionality really have finally finished. So here's the question: is there any reason to install a custom firmware? This particular router has been tested with dd-wrt. It adds some functionality, but the performance was significantly reduced. In general, tomato increases throughput over stock firmwares, but when the number of connections is high and there is up and downloading happening at the same time (ahem, bittorrent, ahem) the performance suffers more than stock. Personally I'm getting really hesitant to bother with it. I guess I'll just stick with the stock firmware for a while. I'll update this if I ever install tomato and let you know how it works out. Observations about the web interface: Pretty darn intuitive. There's an autoconfig option or you can config it yourself. IP reservation was equally easy, if not easier, than it was under tomato. Like all routers the actual loading of the interface pages is slow...not sure what that's about. It's true of tomato as well. Notice that this router also supports attaching a USB drive and basically functioning as a NAS. I choose to use a real NAS because it has powersaving options and so forth instead of just having the drive spin and spin. Anyway, not a function I will use, but some people may. To me it seems pretty neat. Anyway, I'm pleasantly impressed with this router. It was super, super cheap and it has great functionality, both in the hardware and in the software. If I want, I can later install an open source custom firmware. What more could you want from a router? Thanks Netgear. ======== Update ========== The default firmware has been performing well and stable for a long time, but I've decided to go ahead and overwrite it with tomato. There are two reasons for this: 1. You can't disable router logins through the WiFi. I consider WiFi to be really low security, so I don't like it that the router doesn't have the option to disable WiFi logins. Call me paranoid. 2. For some reason the receiving end of the VOIP has been cutting out about a minute into the call. I put the VOIP device on the DMZ, which did not help. I also tried disabling SIP ALG. Also didn't help. My VOIP is pretty important to me, so out with the onboard firmware. The first one was no big deal, but the second was a deal killer. To install tomato you first have to install dd-wrt because they come in different formats and the built-in firmware requires the kind dd-wrt uses. Then you use dd-wrt to install tomato. It's working great. The only downside is that I am no longer getting anywhere near the WiFi speeds I was with the built-in firmware. If WiFi speed is important to you, stick with the built-in firmware. In every other respect that I've seen, tomato is equal to or better than the built-in firmware. You puts down your money and you makes your choice.