NETGEAR FVS336G

We were happy that I'll item came after waiting over a month for another company to never receive it. So far everything is working find.

I just replaced by FVS318 with the FVS336GV3. Took a few hours to get it working. I'm on the latest firmware also. The speedtest.net showed NO IMPROVEMENT over the FVS318. Still getting about 6/5 d/u mbps. When I bypass the FVS336 and go directly to the router I get 60/20. After using Netgear for 10 years, this is so disappointing.9/14/2015 Followup: I was able to determine that WAN1 was extremely slow. When I changed to WAN2, I got the double green and throughput went up significantly. Will provide followup after I contact Netgear.9/15/2015 Followup: Netgear has been responsive to me on this. Their answer was either (a) a factory reset or (b) return it to Amazon.9/18/2015 Followup: I changed back from WAN2 to WAN1 rebooting the Netgear. Surprisingly enough, WAN1 started working...same cable. Still having problems with setting up a midnight e-mail of the log and a particular security issue.9/20/2015 Followup: Customer support has been good. They're elevating the security issue up. FYI ... make sure you change default passwords on Administrator AND Guest. It is possible for Guest to still get access so change the default.9/20/2015 Followup: Wasn't seeing the logs of failed attempts until I put in an inbound service with protocol=ANY, Action=BLOCK, Log=Yes, etc. Also, occasionally the log loses the first character such as the "F" in "Firewall."

This Router is designed to balance the load and routes between two separate WAN IP addresses, so this can't be considered a "feature." It's an essential function to this box. Yet, when this functionality is enabled, other LAN security features, such as IP blocking, MAC filtering, static routing, etc, become extremely quirky, clunky, and unreliable - to the point where a PC that logs on to the LAN (or a PC coming out of standby) can take several minutes to authorize. It then takes 5-10 more minutes for this PC to show Internet connectivity - but don't trust it yet, because its Internet connection will pop in and out dozens of times for up to 30 minutes, before it becomes anything close to reliable. It's totally ridiculous, yet 100% confirmed. By the way, throughput drops dramatically when monitoring or logging is enabled. And don't expect ANY useful help from Netgear "Support" (they use the term pretty loosely). These people just read scripts and have you upload new firmware, even though the new firmware never mentions these issues in the bug fixes. Also, if they're successful at convincing you to try new firmware, ALL your router settings vanish. Don't fall for "backing up" the settings, either. Their newer firmware version is never compatible with the older one, so creating a backup file was nothing but a waste of time. That's right... you will need to go through the entire setup menu again - every page, sub-page, sub-sub-page, and sub-sub-sub page, and restore each and every setting, group. policy, route, address, name, priority, filter, trigger, forward, MAC ID, etc.- and that list is for those of you who don't use VPN. Re-doing all that will take an afternoon. But wait - there's another surprise - the setup menus differ from one firmware version to another, so while you thought you were clever by printing out 30 or 40 setup pages with all your settings, you will later realize that this was yet another exercise in futility, not to mention a waste of paper, toner, and more time. Oh - last thing... you didn't think Netgear actually honored that whole "Lifetime Warranty" and 'Next-Day Replacement" stuff, did you? If you do force them to send a replacement, it will take 1-2 weeks to see the replacement - and it won't be new. Netgear will send you an old defective box that someone else has already returned, quite possibly for the same reason. I went through three, and each one did the same thing.

I have used version 1 of the Netgear ProSAFE FVS336G for several years. I originally used it as a dual WAN security router and had two ISPs (cable and DSL). After I dropped DSL service (in my neighborhood the old telephone infrastructure just wouldn't support anything over 3 MB/s download speeds so it wasn't worth it). The current version of this model is Version 3.0. It no longer has an internal power supply or a power switch. Instead it uses a standard "power block." Also all of the ports are now on the front rather than on the back. This might have made is less expensive to build but it makes for a somewhat more messy desktop. The only way to restart the system is through the "reset" button on the back or by unplugging the power.Initial system set up is simple. You turn off your existing router, if you have one, turn off your cable or DSL modem, plug everything in and then power on your cable or DSL modem. Once the modem is fully operational (all the appropriate lights are "on") you plug in the power for the Netgear router and wait for it to complete its self-test routine (there is a self-test light that will go off once the test is completed). Then you turn on a computer connected to the router and log in the the web interface for the router. The PDF manual provides detailed instructions on how to establish the WAN side connection and configure your LAN. My unit was up and running within few minutes (I had to reboot my cable modem once while the router was powered on and connected to it in order for the router to successfully establish a WAN connection). I bought the new unit because the old one did not have the "throughput" capacity to support the level of service being offered by our ISP (100 MB/s) This one supports up to 350 MB/s (so don't try it with gigabit Internet if you are fortunate to have it). I will post an updated expanded review once I have become more familiar with the web interface that one uses to manage the router.