While beauty is only skin deep, Netgear’s WNR854T ticks most of the boxes when it comes to specs and performance as well.
Netgear has been a long-time player in the home and office networking game. Given their long heritage, it’s not surprising that they are delivering products that show a great deal of refinement both in regards to aesthetics and usability. The WNR854T is a great-looking router that, while skipping on some features, is easy to set up and delivers great performance.
Setting the WNR854T up is straightforward with Netgear’s SmartWizard. It guides you through all the steps, including connecting cables and powering up your modem and router in the right order. The SmartWizard is on the accompanying CD and can be run on any platform as it only requires a web browser. The router needs to be connected to the Internet for the setup to work, as it searches for updated firmware during the setup process.
You can access the router’s configuration options by entering a simple URL in the address bar on your browser, although you’ll need to look for a small slip of paper to find this out as there’s little documentation provided with the router. The user manual and setup guide are on the accompanying CD.
Settings and options, both within the SmartWizard and through the browser-based configuration screens, are clearly laid-out, with plain English descriptions for options provided. User documentation is provided on the CD and is easy to read.
Once the router was up and running we tested its wireless range and performance. Wireless range was outstanding with a fast, stable connection maintained at 30m from the router using our Toshiba Portege R500 test system. Even at that distance, the slowest ping between the laptop and router was just 136m. Typically, we see pings in excess of 1000m at that range, even with products that boast superior antenna and transmission technology.
As you’d expect from a device with Gigabit Ethernet, wired file transfers skipped along, with our test pack of 350MB files being shuffled through in just a few seconds each.
The WNR854T lacks QoS, which might be a significant factor for those into serious gaming or using services such as VoIP. However, for home users we liked the ability to block certain types of traffic. For example, you could block access to specific services such as games that use particular UDP ports, particular URLs or sites that contain particular keywords. While we don’t necessarily see this as a way to censor Internet access, it can be a way of removing distractions at homework time.
Given that the router is the heart of your LAN, we would have hoped that the WNR854T included a USB port along with its five Gigabit Ethernet ports. We see this as a desirable feature that makes sharing printers and hard drives very easy.
So, would we splash out our own money to buy Netgear’s WNR854T Wireless-N + Gigabit Router? Well, it does look great and ticks most of the boxes we’d expect for a home router, but if you’re a small business user or heavy-duty gamer, then the lack of QoS in this unit is a serious letdown. Also, the lack of a USB port is a significant omission.