NetGear WGR614 Wireless-G Router

[phoronix]

Phoronix: NetGear WGR614 Wireless-G Router

With the holidays quickly approaching, if you are looking for a new 802.11g wireless router to connect a few more gadgets to your network but not looking for something expensive, you may be interested in the NetGear WGR614 Wireless-G Router. This wireless router with four 10/100MB Ethernet ports is fairly basic when it comes to its feature set, but from our testing we've found this router that sells well below $50 USD to be quite reliable for home use.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=13168

[Zajec]

This wireless router with four 10/100MB Ethernet ports

Quote from Netgear's official datasheet:

Physical Interfaces
– Internet/WAN: 10/100 Mbps (auto-sensing) Ethernet, RJ-45
– LAN: 4 ports 10/100 Mbps (auto-sensing) Ethernet, RJ-45

Really, you should differentiate bit and byte plus don't miss "per second".

[phelin]

How about the throughput of the router? Testing different file transfer scenarios with wireless-to-wireless, wired-to-wireless and wireless-to-wired configurations would be interesting when reviewing network devices.

[r0ck]

I got the WGR614v9 from my new provider and so far it holds up pretty well. I used to have a 6Mbit/s line with an AVM Box that also ran 820.11g network but that crashed every so often when too many connections where coming in at a steady rate (torrent can do that apparently).

I got no problems with the new one. Got a 20Mbit/s line now and even with a wireless reception rate of 50-60 percent I can get those transferring smoothly to my laptop through several walls. For a regular home use router this should be enough to do some basic networking at decent speeds. Can't say much about direct transfer but it works well (too many factors different between the two systems). If you want to transfer terabytes of data around a large set of computers I'd go for something else but running a few consoles and a laptop/desktop duo is absolutely no problem at all.

People who want to fool around with this thing could also try to run OpenWRT on one of these. Hardware revisions v7 and v8 both apparently support OpenWRT (http://wiki.openwrt.org/Hardware/Netgear).

[phelin]

The reason I was interested in the performance of this router is that I have pretty similar device but with integrated cable modem (Netgear CG834WG) and have noticed not so great performance. I have been trying to find out where to point my blaming finger: the laptop's Intel 3945abg hardware or its drivers that come with Ubuntu 8.10 or the router or something else. Here are some numbers from my tests with the following configuration:

Laptop (Intel 3945abg) <- wireless -> Netgear <- wired -> HTPC (Atheros L1 Gb-lan)

From laptop to HTPC:

# iperf -c 192.168.1.100 -f k -p 10001 -t 30 -i 5
------------------------------------------------------------
Client connecting to 192.168.1.100, TCP port 10001
TCP window size: 16.0 KByte (default)
------------------------------------------------------------
[  3] local 192.168.1.110 port 38542 connected with 192.168.1.100 port 10001
[ ID] Interval       Transfer     Bandwidth
[  3]  0.0- 5.0 sec  1968 KBytes    394 KBytes/sec
[  3]  5.0-10.0 sec  1480 KBytes    296 KBytes/sec
[  3] 10.0-15.0 sec  1568 KBytes    314 KBytes/sec

From HTPC to laptop:

# iperf -c 192.168.1.110 -f K -p 10001 -t 30 -i 5
------------------------------------------------------------
Client connecting to 192.168.1.110, TCP port 10001
TCP window size: 16.0 KByte (default)
------------------------------------------------------------
[  3] local 192.168.1.100 port 57430 connected with 192.168.1.110 port 10001
[ ID] Interval       Transfer     Bandwidth
[  3]  0.0- 5.0 sec  9288 KBytes  1858 KBytes/sec
[  3]  5.0-10.0 sec  8904 KBytes  1781 KBytes/sec
[  3] 10.0-15.0 sec  9168 KBytes  1834 KBytes/sec

So, as you can see there is a quite distinguishable difference depending on the direction of the transfer.

[tormod]

I am a little bit surprised that you wrote an article on this old router (with features of a few years ago) all of a sudden, but let's say maybe it was good for business in some way

You should maybe mention the D-Link DI-524 which is similar and often even cheaper. Or even compare the two on performance, now that would be interesting.

[Panix]

I have that router except it's version 6.

Version 6 seems to run fine in/with Linux. I haven't had a problem (that I know of.... knock on wood).

[retrogunner]

Netgear sells a WGR614L, a version they promote linux hacking and alternate firmwares for. It should be noted that if you have a WGR614 <= revision 8, you can head over to myopenrouter.com for some replacement firmwares.