NETGEAR WNR1500-100NAS N300 Wireless Router IEEE 802.3/3u, IEEE 802.11b/g/n NETGEAR WNR1500-100NAS N300 Wireless Router IEEE 802.3/3u, IEEE 802.11b/g/n

Pros: Has never dropped a connection (but we're never more than 10 feet from the router), solid speed, and easy install.

Cons: The highest connection is 4 bars, and that's only when sitting right in front of it about 3 feet away with no walls in between. If you have a larger house (we have a small condo) and need it to pass through walls, signal strength WILL be an issue. And that will also decrease speed as well as cause dropped connections.

Other Thoughts: It works fine for us because we have a small place with few walls to penetrate.

Pros: One of the better sides to this router is the price. It's about $50-30 if on sale. The router itself is fairly basic, but does have some good features. The antennas are detachable and upgrade able if needed. This feature isn't even found in some $200 routers, so good value there. There's also the NETGEAR GENIE® APP for Android and iTunes. That works fairly well and is a bonus even if you don't use it.

It's external look is fairly minimalistic; nothing flashy.

Cons: Signal strength is probably the most notable weakness to the router, but it's a $50 router. It performs about the same as you would expect it to. However, you can upgrade the antennas later.

Another downside to the router is that there is no USB support. This means you can't use a flash drive or portable hard drive.

Finally, it doesn't support 3rd party firmware yet. Would be nice if it was available, since it does allow for antenna upgrades. This would made for a nice, cheap hackable router.

Other Thoughts: The router is pretty decent overall and it's price reflects what it can do. I transferred GBs of data over the wifi network and I saw no problems. All speeds were typical.

If you have a small to medium sized house this is perfect. The signal strength is strong enough for a family unity.

Overall, I found that the router was more than enough for several computers, consoles, wifi printers, and streaming Netflix.

Would recommend for people looking for a router to provide wireless access for a fair price. It's also a nice project router due to the upgradeable antenna.

Pros: *Easy setup even for beginners
*Small form factor
*Good range
*Netgear Genie

Cons: *No USB for external storage
*Antennas could be better

Other Thoughts: Installing this router is a breeze. I had it up and running in a matter of minutes with no setbacks. I set it up in my garage where my other router is and had no issue grabbing a signal all around my house. Most of my home is hard wired with Cat5 but I do have 2 laptops, 2 tablets and 3 smartphones that rely on Wi-Fi. At the time of this review this router is listed under $50 which is a great deal. At that price I would highly recommend it but at it's regular price of $78.99 there are just too many other options available.

In my testing the router performed very well and while the range was good, it wasn't as good as my TP-LINK TL-WR1043ND but it should be noted that while the signal strength was weaker my browsing and streaming speeds were the same. I would have liked to have seen an USB input on the back to attach an external hard drive. I truly believe this router would benefit those that want a something for their home or business that they can plug to their modem and be up and running in no time. If you are the type of user that needs more control you can install the optional NETGEAR Genie which lets you manage, monitor and repair your network.

Lastly I would like to report that during testing I did not have a single drop or reboot which is great. When making purchases like this I don't just look at the product but I look at who I am buying it from. Netgear has been in the game as long as I can remember and their customer supports has always been good to me when I needed them. I like buying from companies that offer support even for entry level products such as this. You can feel confident about your purchase.

Pros: It is easy to setup using the wizard, and it configures basic security. After opening the box, it was connected to the internet in less than 10 minutes. The Push 'N' Connect feature is good for WPS enabled devices.

Cons: I replaced my existing router with the Netgear WNR1500, and I provisioned it exactly the same and placed it in the same spot. The Netgear range was about 1/2 as far. The spot does have some interference, and I can only use it for the front half of the house. The existing router was able to reach the back of the house, but the service was poor.

Other Thoughts: For the back of my house, I use a second router as an access point. I network using powerline equipment, and it is connected to the access point. I cannot use the repeater function because of the spotty service, but I did use this Netgear router as the access point. In this configuration, it worked great, but the speed is limited by the powerline equipment and my wiring.

Setting up the Netgear for this configuration was simple. I gave it a static LAN address and turned off the DHCP server. I changed the channel to 6 because the primary router is using 11. I also lower the IP address range to allow for static addresses.

I use MAC Address Filtering, and it is easy to setup. It allows for a description which helps keep track of devices. For actual security, I am wired into the router.

I would recommend purchasing another router if range is an issue. Otherwise, it is an adequate router.

Pros: I was not expecting much from this low cost router but was surprised with the performance. I like it so much that it kicked my higher priced router to the shelve as backup hardware.

Setup was the simplest I have encountered. Once I looked at the quick start directions, I used a very short Ethernet cable Plugged in to the router. (prevents 400 Bad Request errors). I entered the address from the instruction sheet / User-admin / password-password and ran the quick setup; done.
The default wireless password printed on the routers label was secure and fairly easy to remember.

I setup a brutal file transfer test using a windows home network between 2 laptops that have wireless revision N nics. The machines were approx. 50’ apart; one in my basement and the other on the first floor. The router is positioned inside a sturdy hardwood roll down desk that is used to house my wifes desktop computer.It took approx. 26 minutes to transfer a 1GB file which works out to be 641KB/s.
I noticed a max value of 855KB/s during the transfer .

I also used speedtest.net to get an idea of the performance;

My gaming laptop positioned within 10’ of the router/n nic;
Ping=37 ms
Download 22.85 Mb/s
Upload 1.94 Mb/s

Older laptop 40’ from the router through the basement floor/computer desk;
N nic;
Ping 42 ms
Download 16.62 Mb/s
Upload 1.94 Mb/s
Older laptop 40’ from the router through the basement floor/computer desk;
G nic;
ping 42ms
download 5.80 Mb/s
upload 1.94 Mb/s

this router has good quality switches that are a must for me because of my addiction to online multiplayer gaming.

Cons: none.

Other Thoughts: great performance, superbly engineered firmware.

Pros: It has no problem handling my 80MBPS download speeds.
It sets it's IP address to 10.0.0.1 so if you plug it into another router, then it will allow you to modify both router's settings without having to change the wiring.

Cons: I keep getting 400 Bad Request errors throughout the router setting page, especially when I run the setup wizard, clicking the option again usually gets me to the page that I requested but never the setup wizard.

This router seems to assume that it should be set up wireless, I plugged it in wired first and couldn't get anything out of it, then connected my laptop to it and it popped up the configuration page when I opened firefox. It also wouldn't go to any page other than the configuration page until I closed firefox and reopened it.

The repeater function is pretty cool, but it has to have a specific channel and it can't have any wireless security at all.

The range of this router doesn't seem to be very far for me, I guess it could be the walls in my apartment. I tried to connect with my Encore N150 usb adapter N82E16833180074, which got a strong signal outside my apartment, but I couldn't seem to connect to any websites and had to go back into my apartment to have a connection. I continued to walk further from my router and it kept the strong connection statement but I still couldn't connect to any websites, so I disconnected and couldn't detect the router until I was back at my apartment's door.

Other Thoughts: This router was a bit unusual, it seems like a decent router if you only need it for around the house to synchronize multiple devices, but it doesn't really have much of a range in apartments and it works much better wireless than wired which is pretty odd.

Pros: Pretty small and light. Simple green indicator lites. Wireless stable and works at rated speeds. Plenty of features for such a basic router.

I also thought the QoS settings were more clear and easier to deal with than on many of the other routers I have/have had.

Cons: I only have three complaints. 2 of them are kind of 'meh' type complaints - the antennas come loose rather easily, and my uplink port is loose (as in the port itself is loose, not as in the cable is loose) - you can wiggle it with your thumb or see it move in whichever direction the cable is pulling.

The third complaint is more just a 'Huh?'

This things says on the box and on Newegg that it's supposed to have the Netgear Genie dashboard. Mine is at firmware version 1.0.0.10_1.0.4, the upgrade utility will not upgrade it further, and it clearly has some 'Netgear Smartwizard' UI that uses iFrames and stuff. I have a Centria, which I rather like, with Netgear Genie, and it's a completely different interface and UI. I'm not really sure what's up with this - maybe I got an older one?

Other Thoughts: It actually auto-detected that it should use the 10.0.0.* network instead of 192.168.1.* when I daisy-chained it with another router.

I would have been happier with this if it had Netgear Geanie like it says on the box instead of 'Smartwizard.'

Pros: As with all Netgear products I have used... the user interface is perhaps the easiest to understand and use. I feel Netgear now rivals Linksys in every way and perhaps exceeds them in some areas such as the user interface, nice job Netgear. External removable antennas a huge plus **
Documentation provided for this device is straight forward and understandable by most anyone with basic knowledge of networking. The on-line literature is the same but does offer a users guide for the Genie app. (+) The Genie app allows access to the most used settings of the router without actually “logging in” including retrieval of the wifi pass phrase which to most would be a huge plus, especially if you change it from the default, the network mapping feature is cool as well.
My wireless connections have been rock-solid for the past week... no problem realized here at all, Netgear seems to have the dependability part worked out on their devices.
All the transfer speeds I have tested through this router have been spot-on with the specs.
WPS makes connection to other WPS enabled devices a snap, this is a great feature to look for in wireless devices.
The rubber griper feet on the device are nice if you are placing it on the desktop, they keep it from sliding around too easily.

Cons: The Netgear Genie app is a great plus.... but alas... no Linux support although this router is fully functional using Linux, and the app runs ok using Wine. Granted most users do run Windows or Mac... but I personally choose Linux so the fact that there is no Linux support forces me to take away one star. The app is available for Droid... so I really don't understand the inability to provide support for the rest of the Linux community as well... your nearly there all-ready Netgear, wouldn't it be great to be the first to be able to say you fully support the Linux community?
This router DOES NOT offer WEP... although this is not a major issue to most, those having older equipment beware, you may want to update your equipment as WEP is very outdated and not very secure anyway.

Other Thoughts: This device has full support for Netgear Ready-Share? There is no physical (USB) connection on the device for this feature... the Genie supports it but perhaps only for models that have the feature? I find this a bit confusing at this point, does the Genie support other models of routers / modem routers?
The base of this router looks as if it could come off to allow wall mounting??? I could find no info in the literature as to the feature nor could I seem to remove it easily with out fear of breaking it, so I left it alone, it would be a plus if it was wall mountable.
Do all these units have the same default wifi pass phrase??? (just wondering? lol)
A bit of additional advice, as with any wireless device... security is only as good as the password... contrary to Netgears suggestion to leave the wifi pass-phrase as it is, I suggest otherwise. Passwords should NEVER be based on words found in the dictionary... alpha-numeric passwords with 8 or more characters in random order and with random upper/lower case are the strongest, at the very least make sure you change the admin password... this would be a critical step for sure.
Parental control option using open-dns... I'm not placing this feature as a plus or minus... open-dns is a third party service which you have to create an account for. As a rule I do not opt for services from a third party, where parental control comes into play I opt for simple domain blocking and internet access time limitations.
** I say that external antennas are a huge plus, it is a feature that I personally look for when purchasing most any wireless device. I want the ability to not only replace the antenna with one of higher gain, but also I want the ability of placing an antenna some distance from the router if needed, as in my situation I have an old farmhouse that has been added onto. I am stuck with an interior wall that was at one time an exterior wall and is lined with brick, it is nearly impossible to make a wireless connection through that. With an antenna placed remotely in that side of the house (about 12 feet away from the router) it solves the problem without the need of additional devices. (This can also solve the similar problem of a two story house.)

Pros: -Great Wireless range for a 2-3 story house with it going through a lot of walls.
-Does not disrupt my wireless connections to other routers.-
-Speed is decent for wireless, WLAN is nice not gigabit thats fine
-Antennas help with wireless

Cons: Antennas not a big fan but i dont look at it everyday like a book or a screen.

Nothing Else

Other Thoughts: I use multiple routers in my house and with all them signals this has not dropped or been in a problem its great!!!

Pros: Simple to connect the Netgear router to a cable modem and a multiport switch. Firmware update simple to do on first setup. Good range and signal strength (5 bars) through multiple walls. Tested 24.4 Mbps download over wireless according to speedtest, similar to wired. No dropped connections. Satisfied with the performance so far.

Cons: The looks are not as sleek as other wireless routers, but it is kept in a closet so it doesn’t make much of a difference.