Netgear WNDR4000 N750 review

From the name, you might suspect that Netgear's N750 cable router was capable of some truly stratospheric speeds. In theory, you'd be right, although the number is a bit of a fudge. Its theoretical top speed isn't 750Mbits/sec but 450Mbits/sec (the N750 moniker is arrived at by adding the theoretical top speeds available in each frequency band – 300Mbits/sec over 2.4GHz and 450Mbits/sec over 5GHz).

Still, this is plenty of power, and it translated to good speed in our wireless tests. From a distance of around 2.5m over 2.4GHz, we achieved average speeds of 11.8MB/sec, and over 5GHz that climbed to 22.5MB/sec. Long-range speed (from around 40m with a wall and a double-glazed window in the way) over 2.4GHz was decent as well, with the N750 achieving an average speed of 3.1MB/sec.

Where this router fell short, however, was with its long-range performance in the 5GHz frequency band. We measured an average rate of 0.7MB/sec in the long-range test.

That’s disappointing, especially in light of its cousin's (the N600) excellent long-range performance. That router was 52% faster over 2.4GHz and 309% faster over 5GHz in the same test. And there are more areas where it doesn’t match up. N750 is compatible with only cable connections; there’s only one USB socket; and NAS performance is middling. With a portable USB 3 drive hooked up, our tests returned 3.8MB/sec.

At least you get the same, feature-packed web front-end as with the N600, with support for media sharing and user-level access control to shared drives, a wireless repeater function for extending existing 2.4GHz networks, and the same bandwidth monitoring features.

But even with four Gigabit Ethernet ports at the rear, all these features, and the raw speed over 5GHz at close range, the N750 can’t overcome its biggest problem. It isn't as good or as cheap as its cousin, the N600.

Author: Jonathan Bray