Labs

Full marks to Netgear for originality: its Draft-N router has a striking upright design and no external aerials. The only annoyance was the bright-blue flashing activity LED on the front.

At close range, the data throughput of 23Mb/sec was average. At long range, it could only manage 4Mb/sec, and that was after setting it to Auto channel selection. If you don't do this, it won't use channel sharing for better bandwidth, crippling transfer rates further.

The PC Card adapter costs more than some

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routers at £85 exc VAT. Setup was simple, though - the wizard helps you connect and offers the appropriate settings. Its signal strength monitor shows all SSIDs in range. Another nice touch is that when you log on to the router, the firmware assistant asks to automatically check for the latest firmware.

Wireless settings include WPA and WPA2, but not RADIUS authentication or WEP. When you block websites with the keyword filter, you can exclude one PC, and the RangeMax can email notifications when someone tries to access a blocked site. You can also block services such as FTP, web surfing and email for specific PCs, and apply a schedule.

There aren't as many advanced options as the DrayTek, but there's port forwarding for servers and port triggering. DDNS uses www.dyndns.org, and you can restrict remote management to one or a range of IP addresses.

The Netgear is well designed, and looks good if it has be on show somewhere. But it's beaten at long range by the Belkin and Zyxel and both router and adapters are overpriced.