Netgear Super Wireless ADSL Router

This Netgear router is compact enough to fit anywhere and the silver-white colour scheme means it should find a home in the most style-conscious of living rooms. There’s intelligent design beneath the looks, too. Clip-on plastic feet are provided if you’d prefer to save space and mount the modem vertically. The single adjustable antenna is removable and uses a standard SMA connection, so it’s easy to install another. Furthermore, default settings such as its IP address, user name and password are printed on the base of the unit – handy if you’ve a tendency to lose manuals.

Netgear also appears to be just about the only company around which understands that a Setup Wizard is supposed to be helpful, not just ask for cryptic settings over a series of pages. When configuring ADSL it provides an option to automatically detect your settings.

There are plenty of other options, too, but their implementation isn’t quite as good as you’ll find elsewhere. It’s possible to block Web access at particular times of day, for instance. However, this is a global setting for the entire network and there’s no option to create separate policies per machine. There’s also site blocking by URL or keyword, but no content filtering.

Another stumbling block is its 54g wireless performance, which is fractionally behind the pack at 17Mbps with WPA enabled (although the 108Mbps mode could lift you to 32Mbps if you’ve got compatible clients). Yet the price is the major disappointment.