Labs

Netgear's RangeMax Wireless Modem Router has the most comprehensive CD-based setup wizard here. At the end of the process you'll have an internet connection and a secured wireless network.

There are no QoS settings, which is a shame if you use VoIP or other time-sensitive applications a lot. As with Trendnet's TEW-435BRM, Netgear has implemented web filtering. You can restrict access to websites based on address and keywords, and schedule times at when the web is available. It's great if you've got kids, but the manual configuration has to be done carefully. For example, filtering by the keyword 'sex' would immediately block access to

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any website with the word 'middlesex' in it.

There's the usual range of advanced settings, including UPnP (which is switched on by default) and port forwarding. Netgear's web interface is excellent and has a sidebar that contains help on the current settings. There are no QoS settings, though.

Although the router doesn't have any visible antennas, the case houses seven of them for MIMO. This should help increase range and throughput. It also offers channel-bonding, which uses two wireless channels to double the potential throughput from 54Mbit/s to 108Mbit/s when used with one of Netgear's matching network adaptors.

Despite this, performance wasn't as good as we'd hoped. With our Centrino notebook the RangeMax produced the worst throughputs here - just 11.02Mbit/s at 1m. It was also the only router that failed to connect at 25m.

Switching to the Netgear's WPN511 CardBus adaptor (£23 from www.pixmania-pro.co.uk) didn't improve performance much. The 14.26Mbit/s throughput at a range of 1m isn't very impressive, and the 2.54Mbit/s at 25m was the worst result here.

The RangeMax is very easy to configure, but its poor throughputs mean that Buffalo's WBMR-G125 router is by far the better buy.