NETGEAR WNDAP330 ProSafe Wireless Dual Band Access Point

I have been running Netgear ProSafe networking equipment for many years for my small office at home. Due to its typically high reliability, performance and value I always stick with the prosafe line (geared toward business or enterprise use) over the consumer grade networking gear which is often unreliable. This is the first 802.11n unit that I found which was designed for the enterprise. So I broke down and picked it up for about $300 with shipping. The most important thing to know about this unit is that despite their advertising this unit as a dual band with both 802.11n and 802.11abg radios; the radios cannot both be used at the same time. You can only turn on one or the other. This is a major limitation as far as I'm concerned. For those of us replacing old 802.11g equipment my preference would be for this unit to be able to support 802.11g legacy clients with one of the radios and also be able to support 802.11n 5ghz clients with the other 5ghz radio.

The range of the unit in 5ghz 40 mhz mode is quite short. Definately less than the WG102 802.11g unit that it was replacing. Since the range is so short I will have to get an additional unit and put it upstairs. Also, the firmware is a bit buggy and reliability doesn't seem as good as the mature wg102 unit. I'm certain that reliability will improve over time and perhaps speed too; but righ now I'd recommend sticking with 802.11g unless you absolutely have to upgrade to 802.11n.

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update

After countless hours of troubleshooting, I've finally narrowed down the problem. The unit is just not reliable with WMM turned on regardless of 20/40 mhz. With WMM turned off the unit is super reliable but only runs at 54mbps.

Stay away from this unit until more firmware updates are available resolving the WMM problem with Intel 5300 and Intel 4965 laptop nic cards. Don't know if this applies to other vendor nic cards.

I previously owned a WG302 and had a very positive experience. So when I needed an access point for the office that supported multiple SSIDs, VLANs and security levels this one looked great! There was only one misunderstanding: This access point supports (2.4GHz) BGN or AN (5.0GHz) but not at the same time. This was not a requirement for us so there was no real loss.

Setup was smooth and operation has been without issue.

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I bought this product because I've had success with Netgear products in the past and recently purchased a new Dell laptop with Intel Wifi 5100 AGN. I've read reports that the consumer versions of the N access points were not very reliable, so I decided to spent the extra money and buy the "enterprise" model. I was wrong.

The access point is very reliable in BG mode, but N mode is very unreliable. At 5GHz the range is very short. N mode at 2.4GHz is better, but either way the router will randomly disconnect the connection or the connection will freeze. I watched the network utilization while copying a 50GB file, and the utilization varies erratically all the way down to 0 where it would sometimes stick at 0 for several seconds( causing Vista explorer to error out on copying the file ). I mapped out the used channels in my local neighborhood and am using a specially set unused channel so the problem is not interference.

Netgear technical support has not been very helpful. I sent them detailed information telling them that I have upgraded the firmware and network card drivers to the lastest version and all they did was send me a canned reply telling me to upgrade to the latest version.

My advice to others is to not upgrade to N mode until the final specification is released. At the moment, N mode is simply not developed enough for reliable operation.

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Pros easy to setup with solid User Interface. Throughputs are good in 2.4ghz setting even with dense urban installation and lots of interference, and the router has not went down yet after one month of use. Prosafe products always seem to be pretty solid (running a few prosafe gigabit switches as well)

Cons the router did seem to experience some memory leakage once while it still worked, the throughput dropped significantly but a reboot fixed and it hasn't done it since.

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