Netgear R6300 WiFi Router 802.11ac Dual Band Gigabit

Netgear?s R6300 WiFi Router 802.11ac Dual Band Gigabit ($199.99) introduces Netgear?s 11ac offering to the market. In a rather bold move, Netgear actually uses the ?802.11ac? standard in the name of this product, although 802.11ac is yet to be ratified and is not expected to be until sometime next year.

Which means the R6300 ?is a draft router and the second draft 11ac router I?ve tested. I?m not a big fan of draft 802.11x hardware. I remember some pretty quirky draft 802.11n routers. Today?s 802.11n routers are far better devices than their draft predecessors. It seems like wireless router manufacturers are eager to get 11ac routers on the market even in draft form.

Unfortunately, the R6300 performs like a draft router and falls a bit short of the excellence expected from Netgear, although as an 802.11n router running in N-only, performance is fine. An odd design and surprisingly underwhelming performance running in 11ac mode does not make this router one of Netgear?s best.

Specs and Design
Netgear deviated from the traditional round-edged look of its N750 and N900 dual-band routers. The R6300 has angular corners and sits upright in an attached base at about a 45 degree angle. It?s a bizarre design and resembles a large digital photo frame or some type of media player. It looks like a device meant to be put on display?which a router typically isn?t. The worst part of the design is you are limited with its placement. Although you can remove the base, you can?t operate it horizontally because of the way the cables sit in the power and LAN/WAN ports. It?s also not wall-mountable.

The side panel has a Wi-Fi on/off button, a WPS button and a USB 2.0 port. The rear panel has a second USB 2.0 port, 4 Gigabit LAN ports, the WAN port, and the power button. The USB ports support both printers and external storage, although lack of USB 3.0 in a supposed future-proofed 11ac router is disappointing.

The base has rubber footing to keep the device in place, but this is a large router and is not going to move around much even with cables connected. The R6300 measures 8.07 by 10.04 by 3.03 inches (HWD) and weighs 1.44 pounds.

The R6300 supports up to 450 Mbps on the 2.4 GHz band and up to 1300 Mbps on the 5 GHz band. Netgear recommends using the router with 3x3 stream capable wireless adapters such as the Intel Centrino 6300/6500 or a 3x3 802.11ac adapter. The problem is there aren?t any 802.11 ac adapters on the market yet, although Netgear has the A6200 Wi-Fi dual band 802.11ac USB adapter coming soon.

Other internal specs include 128 MB flash memory, 128 MB RAM and internal radio amplifiers. Externally, Netgear seems to have taken a cue from Cisco Linksys? latest dual-band routers, because the R6300 like some of the Cisco Linksys devices features a glowing company logo on the housing when the device is powered. After hours of uptime the R6300 runs quiet and very cool.

Setup
Once the R6300 is wired to a broadband modem and a computer is connected to one of its LAN ports, you can go to https://routerlogin.net to open the Genie management software for configuration. The router ships pre-configured with SSID for both bands and passkeys.

The Genie setup wizard detects and sets up your network connection. Next, the Genie software utility is downloaded and installed on the local machine. The Genie software provides a number of apps and widgets to manage and monitor the router. Genie opens to a dashboard view displaying Internet status, wireless connections, and a network map (which graphically shows how and which devices are connected in your network).

From Genie, you can perform basic setup tasks such as configuring Airprint to allow iOS devices to print to a connected printer. You can setup parental control or use some of the diagnostic tools provided in the software for troubleshooting connection issues.

?You can also access more advanced router settings. Within advanced settings you can change wireless configurations, IPv6, QoS and more.

Overall, Genie is a pleasant interface to work in and easy to navigate through. One feature that seems like a waste of system resources is located under the Wireless widget in the dashboard view. The Genie software displays the SSIDs and passkeys? as an animated endless scroll. What exactly is the purpose of that and who thought it was a great idea to have a network's password scroll as some sort of decoration by default,?within an interface?

With the R6300, you also have other advanced configuration options such as operating the device as a wireless repeater, setting up port forwarding and port triggering, DDNS and extensive IPv6 support that includes IPv6 DHCP and 6to4 tunneling (which allows IPv6 traffic to transmit over an IPv4 network).

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ziffdavis/pcmag/~3/OVG9JgQ9-cA/0,2817,2406726,00.asp

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