Netgear WNR3500L Wireless-N Router Review

Recently, I traveled through the intertubes on over to my favorite online electronic reseller newegg. While I was there I noticed that they had the Netgear WNR3500L on sale so I did some research. I read some decent reviews that spoke to the routers hardware. A few things that stood out for me..

• Four gigabit ports (upgrade over my old 100MB)


• USB port for network sharing (no more leaving a PC on just to share files)


• Wireless-N with up to 300 Mb/s


• Double Firewall


• Support for guest wireless


• WPA/WPA2 supported


• 3 internal antennas


• Total throughput monitoring and logging

All these features made me a bit envious. My old router was an old school wireless g that lacked most of those features. While all these things sounded great, the icing on the cake was the WNR3500L's support of a Linux kernel. Given the fact that it runs on an open-source platform that means a few things. Each component that the router runs is developed by different partner companies (usually making them better) and the router supports DD-WRT, Tomato, OpenWRT, and other linux based open source firmware. Given the full feature set that the router ships with, and the fact that different components are developed by specialized companies, I don't think I'll ever have need to flash the firmware to DD-WRT or anything similar. However, if I wanted to... I could!

Another great thing about the fact that this router is open sourced is that it is backed by a user community. My Open Router has plenty of how-to guides and feed back from other users of the router. If the router interests you, you can check out Netgear's product page here.