Netgear N600 Wireless Dual Band Gigabit ADSL2+ Modem Router review

Netgear’s N600 is a plain-looking combination ADSL2+ and cable router, only livened up with a blue stripe surrounding the status lights. It’s a no-nonsense exterior that hides an impressive specification – 2.4 and 5GHz bands and comprehensive support for network storage and guest networks.

There’s nothing fancy about the router’s setup process, either. A double-sided A4 sheet in the box tells you simply to plug the router in to the ADSL line and type the setup address into your browser. You’ll then be confronted with Netgear’s setup interface, which lists the router’s configuration pages in a column on the left and comprehensive, well-written help for each option on the right.

The clear options and help make it easy to find options such as port forwarding, QoS and the DMZ, but dig a bit deeper and you find some useful advanced features. Plugging a USB hard disk or flash drive into the router’s front or rear USB ports lets you mount it as a local shared hard disk or set it up to be accessed over the internet via FTP or HTTPS. The wireless page lets you enable one or more of up to 10 separate networks: primary 2.4GHz and 5GHz networks, along with up to four guest networks for each, all with their own WPA or WPA2 passwords – but to connect at any speed faster than 54Mbit/s 802.11g you’ll need to use WPA2-AES encryption.

The guest networks are a useful way to let others use your home network for internet access while stopping them from accessing computers on your network, and you can define different levels of access for each. We were worried initially that having so many networks running concurrently would slow down the wireless connection, but turning on every 2.4 and 5GHz network didn’t make an appreciable speed difference to our 10m ‘Far’ test.

While the 2.4GHz band is useful for non-5GHz-compatible devices such as mobile phones and older laptops, the 5GHz band avoids interference with other 2.4GHz devices (such as some DECT cordless phones) so can lead to higher speeds. When testing with our 5GHz-compatible laptop, transfer speeds were impressive. Using the laptop’s built-in Centrino 2 chipset and with 300Mbit/s mode enabled, which uses two 5GHz channels to improve throughput, we transferred files at our 1m ‘near’ test at a huge 54.8Mbit/s. At our 10m ‘far’ range, speeds were still up at 48.4Mbit/s, which makes the N600 router faster than any of the models in our last router test (see Labs, Shopper 280). In our 25m ‘very far’ test, speeds dropped to 9.8Mbit/s, but this is still one of the best results we’ve seen.

With Netgear’s own WNDA3100 USB adaptor (£37) we saw 45.1Mbit/s at 10m, which is similar to our Centrino 2 result, and 17.1Mbit/s at 15m. We managed to improve our 25m result slightly by turning off channel bonding, which pushed transfer speeds up to 18.4Mbit/s – making the N600N overall the fastest router we have tested at 5GHz. The router isn’t quite so impressive in 2.4GHz mode – speeds with our Centrino 2 laptop were only average, and it was slower than most with its own adaptor in this mode.

Netgear’s N600 is a very expensive router, but its comprehensive support for guest networks and superb transfer speeds make it stand out from the rest. If you mainly use 2.4GHz devices on your wireless network the Belkin Play Max N600 HD makes more sense, but if you’re using more modern equipment the fast and fully-featured N600 is an excellent choice.