Thread: Netgear WNR3700 Router

The WNR3700 breaks ground for design as far as Netgear goes. It's wall mountable and the router itself, although large, is well designed and built solidly. The top is piano-black and the front has a transparent plastic bezel that has a nice effect on the embedded LEDs underneath. It's clearly meant as a high-end product for larger homes with lots of clients as it features dual simultaneous bands - both 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands. There's a USB port (storage link) as well. The front panel has indicators for everything including both frequency bands along with the de facto LAN port indicators. A Security indicator was missed.

Setting it up was a snap, Netgear's firmware is well laid out and between them and Linksys the better one is purely a matter of preference. This router did well as was expected for a flagship of their "Range Max" series. In fact, in zone one with a sequential transfer speed of 13.16 MBps, this beat our performance king the Linksys WRT61ON. Assorted scores were also an all time high. It managed 50 MB in 9 seconds flat i.e. 5.56 MBps. This was not to be consistent however, as the scores dipped below 1 MBps in zone two and below 0.5 MBps in zone three.

Therefore the WRT610N remains the king at longer distances and with obstructions meaning its antenna and chipset are better and more suited to intensive tasks. Streaming 1080p content was a snap in zone one, a little annoying with the occasional lag in zone two and a sporadic affair in zone three. Priced at Rs. 11,000, the WNR3700 isn't the best router around, but it's the costliest one we've tested to date, making it languish close to the bottom of our recommendations list.