Netgear Rangemax Wireless Router
- 3 minutes to read
- edit
The other night I needed to purchase a new wireless router for my home network. I have had a Netgear MR814 wireless router for about 5 years now and have never had any problems with it. I needed a new one since I was sending this one out to my ex. Since I have had such good luck with this router, I knew that I was going to purchase another Netgear router. I wasn’t prepared, however, for the number of different choices. (When I bought mine, that was pretty much the only choice if you wanted to spend under $200.)
I ended up buying a Netgear Rangemax (model WPN824) for just under $100. It wasn’t the cheapest model I could have bought, but I think it offered me the most for my money. Installation was as simple as snapping the feet on, plugging it in, and hooking up the network cables.
After a brief phone call with Brighthouse to reset my cable modem, I was all set. This is an important step for anyone that is upgrading their router or adding a router for the first time. Once most cable modems are turned on for the first time and receive the MAC address of the network device they are connected to, they won’t serve up an IP address for any other network device. This took me a little while to realize that I was running in to this problem. Once I called Brighthouse and actually spoke to someone in technical support, he reset my modem and everything was happy. A few things worth noting:
- The option to reset the modem through the voice menu didn’t have any effect as this is more of a “soft reset”.
- If you have a VOIP phone, call from a different number. When the tech resets the modem, they are able to do a “hard reset” which will drop your call while the modem is resetting.
After I was able to get back on the internet, I did upgrade the firmware on the router as it was rather out of date. This process was also very painless and completely handled by the web-based administration pages.
Overall, I spent about 45 minutes total setup time. This included taking the router out of the box and the time spent on the phone with Brighthouse.
Hooking my laptop up through the wireless connection was a easy as entering my WPA key and I’m getting a sustained 54 Mbps transfer rate.
This is definitely a router that I will be keeping for a long time, it was well worth the money.