2010 Back to School Guide: Netgear WNDR3400 Wireless Dual-Band Router

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Product At-a-Glance

Summer is quickly drawing to a close, school is starting, and college students everywhere are moving into their dorms or apartments. With the new laptop, iPhone, and Xbox 360 that’s coming back to school, wireless networking is a necessity. The only question is, can the Netgear WNDR3400 survive the college life?

Like most new routers, the WNDR3400 is a dual-band wireless-N router, meaning that you can get speeds up to 300 Mb/s without wires. Obviously in practice, those speeds are significantly lower. However, this speed is still much improved from the old wireless-G standard, allowing for quick file transfers, lag-free gaming, and streaming HD video all without wires.

With the WNDR3400, you also get 4 Ethernet ports for standard wired connections. You might expect with wireless-N networking that the WNDR3400 would come with Gigabit Ethernet, but sadly, it falls a bit short. 10/100 Mbps ports line the back of the router, which are a bit disappointing. You can achieve faster transfer rates over wireless than with wired networking, which is a bit backwards. However, if your devices are primarily wireless, this shouldn’t prove to be much of a problem for you.

As far as router features are concerned, you get a USB port that allows for network sharing of a storage device. For example, you can plug a simple USB flash drive into the router, and it’ll share the contents of that device with the entire network. The same concept works with USB hard drives, allowing for easy setup of network attached storage.

With its dual-band wireless, you can create two different SSIDs, one for your B/G network and one for your wireless-N network. Similarly, different passwords and authentication settings can be assigned for each of the networks.

You can also setup a guest network (again with two SSIDs to differentiate the network speeds) that creates a separate virtual network for guest users. This way, you can allow your friend on your network without giving them your password. You can also choose whether guest users should be allowed to get access to the local network, so shared network files can be hidden from guests if so desired.

Standard service and site blocking is available, with the ability to whitelist certain IP addresses on the network. Similarly, you get your typical port forwarding setup and dynamic DNS options.

On the more advanced side of things, you can monitor your bandwidth usage as well as setup Quality of Service (QoS) filtering. QoS allows certain services to receive preferential treatment when bandwidth is scarce. The WNDR3400 also has a wireless repeating functionality, which can provide the ability to repeat a router’s signal using the WNDR3400.

Ultimately, the WNDR3400 is a feature-filled router that is easy to setup and manage. Will it work well at college? Absolutely. Will it work well at home? Sure. If wired connectivity is important to you, there are better routers out there, but if you’re just looking for a simple wireless-N router, the WNDR3400 is a great option for you.