Mark,

Thanks for your comments. We are committed to pre-n routers and supporting all routers that are commercially available. We have added support for the Belkin N1 in our latest 4.0 release that is due out shortly.

You can download and try a preview of this new release at:

http://www.networkmagic.com/digitallife/

and join our beta program to receive further announcements.

I would also urge you to call our support team to help troubleshoot your net2go problem, net2go should work with any UPnP compliant router - a standard which all of the draft-n routers do support. If you are having problems, you may have uncovered an interesting bug.

I understand the frustration with NM not working with the latest hardware as soon it comes out. Again, we are committed to adding new driver support for these new routers in each release, but it usually takes us a rev or two get caught up.

Thanks for your understanding,
-Brett.

Brett, I just sent an email. I guess the thing that bugs me here is that you don't say anything to address what Pure Networks is going to do about the new routers. You come across as CNET and give reviews instead of addressing the lack of compliance your product faces with this new technology. Please address that. I was very disappointed, after purchasing your product that I cannot use Net2Go. I wish I knew of that before. No problem, simply please address the new compliance issue.

Thanks. Mark

In your statement in August, you write... "In the last 3 months or so, we have seen a flurry of new routers on the market labeled either "draft n" or "pre n". In this post, I'm going to take a look at these new routers, see how they compare to the router you may have in your home and help you decide if you should go buy one."

My statement here, and perhaps for many others is, it's too late, we bought one. Not too many people are concerned if whether you should be our council in buying a new router, we just want to KNOW, are you going to make your software WORK for it??? I am a subsciber of Network Magic, but some of the features do NOT work with my new, and proud to say, Belkin N1 Wireless. Are you going to wait to predict the industry standard will not take advantage of this, and therefore, care less about the customer base you have and NOT address the products THEY chose to buy and then NOT upgrade your software? OR, are you working on a fix to address these New Generation routers?

Please tell us you have the CUSTOMERS in mind and are addressing this, even if they cannot take advantage of the latest technology, that is BESIDES the point. If not, perhaps we should rethink YOUR product until 2008 when you decide to address this "standard".

Thanks for understanding that us as consumers, AND YOUR CUSTOMERS are buying the latest in technology, despite what you may recommend. If we need to buy a router, we might as well buy the latest in technology, instead of buying a new one again later when it becomes a "standard". For $150, WHO CARES!!!

Thanks for your PROMPT attention to this matter and developing updates for YOUR customers.

Have forgotten my password and name of computer and can not complete the necessary forms.

I have now finished direct comparisons of 3 vendor products in the same environment.

LinkSys WRT300N/WCM300N

NetGear WNR854T

DLink DIR635/DWA642/DWA645/DWA542

The winner, by a WIDE margin, is Dlink ... specifically, the 635 router. DIR625 failed to connect using PPPoE, and Dlink was unable to resolve the problem.

My environment: Alcatel SpeedTouch DSL Modem -> Linksys DIR635 -> Dlink DGS2205 Gigabit Switch.

Wireless speed: 300Mbps

Switch Connect: 100Mbps

Samba storage: 1000Mbps

The Netgear Gigabit connect should have provided a clear benefit in this setup, because I'm having to funnel 300Mbps thru 100Mbps in order to reach my Gigabit network.

Dlink thruput and responsiveness was exactly as expected for my tests.
- CPU time was as expected

Linksys was 100 times slower, because the PCI card consumed excessive amounts of CPU time, showing up in both the app I was running and SYSTEM time. The speed dropped to 13Mbps, and stayed there. There were numerous disconnects, causing issues with the backend servers.

NetGear was about 25% of the measured thruput of this test, compared to DLink.

My tests involved cross-brand connections between vendor PCI and PCcard devices. The LinkSys cards were by far the slowest and most troublesome.

The best news of all: Dlink firmware to control/manage/log activity on the router is BRILLIANT; Best-of-breed, in my opinion.

At one point, I thought NetGear would outperform DLink, and then I would have to choose between Speed and Ease-Of-Use.

Solid tests showed I didn't have to choose.

The only outstanding issue I have with DLink is that the matching PCI DeskTop adapter, DWA547 is not yet shipping.

It's not yet clear to me what advantages it will provide. I can can get about 17-18% utilization of the 300Mbps bandwidth using a single data stream, which is respectable considering the 100Mbps step-down in the middle.

ps., the test was backing up 10,000+ files, 500GB to Samba. Linksys was an all-night run, full of errors. I blame that on their PCI DeskTop adapter.

Swapping Dlink Adapter for LinkSys improved the stability and cpu usage to the LinkSys router, but was much MUCH slower, so I didn't bother to time it.

NetGear was so slow, I didn't let it run more than a few minutes.

I found this site after armwrestling Linksys 300N products for a week.

I don't agree with the lead-in article that we should be avoiding this technology ... just certain non-responsive vendors like Linksys.

I agree with Paul ... it was the signal Range issue I was trying to fix, and the 300Mbps speed came along for free.

I'm quite happy testing the Dlink equipment, but I had no idea NetGear had a gigabit switch.

I connect: DSL -> WirelessRouter -> Gigabit switch. My GB wired machines never pass thru the Wireless portion.

The Linksys connection speeds were terrible. Start out at 270Mbps, and quickly degrade to 13Mbps. I'm pretty sure the issue was with the Linksys 300N PCI card.

Dlink shows constant 300Mbps connection speeds, but I think they might be reporting a CONSTANT, unmeasured speed.

Thanks for the pointer to the speed measuring tool.

Using all Linksys Draft-N products, and I am in heaven. There is a setting for the Drivers for the PCI Adapter and the Laptop Card called Afterburner, enable that setting and the files will fly. I am very happy with the Linksys products. Would not want any other way.

I would like to make one point with respect to the review of pre-N routers versus the 8.11g:

"Thick brick walls"

I was running a netgear 'g' router at my shop. Great connectivity, but appalling range. I then installed the Belkin pre-n one and the client cards.
From no signal at all in the back office to 95%plus and good speed too. I fully accept that this may not be an issue for all users, but if you want to put PCs where you like and leave the router next to the 'phone connection, I would thouroghly recommend using them.

I agree with Jordan M. I could really use a wireless router with a 10/100/1000 switch built in. Most of my network is wired, and I have a gigabit switch on a VPN. Files fly through that VPN, but not through the wireless MIMO router (which is only 10/100.) Netgear is the only Vendor that has thought this through.

Hi Steve,

Some good news, and some delayed good news :)

The delayed good news is that we are adding support for the draft n routers in the next release. While my comments above were with respect to the speed improvements of draft n, Pure Networks is fully committed to supporting the routers that vendors are shipping.

As D-Link is a partner of ours, Network Magic always works with their routers out of the box with no change needed on our side. This way we can ensure a best-of-breed experience for D-Link customers with some of the advanced features. For the other vendors, we have to build and ship extra drivers.

The good news for you, is that we actually sneaked in support for the WRT 300N into a silent update on our website. We haven't pushed an 'update alert' to existing customers for this as the changes were so minor we didn't want to bug everyone. The latest build if you download it today is 3.2.6221.0. If you don't have this build, then you might want to update NM by doing a manual upgrade.

Thx,
-Brett

--
Brett Marl
CTO, Pure Networks
www.networkmagic.com

Unfortunately I had a lightening stike last month which took out my old faithfull linksys router.
When I went to Comp USA, had a choice of the front row latest wireless routers.
With the excellent history I've had with Linksys, I picked the WRT-300N. As did several others in the store while I was there.
Seems like an awful lot of us got hosed. No home network and out $150.
When I went back, there were mostly "N" routers on the big displays. The 'G's were all bottom shelf and not Linksys.
Is there any liklehood at all that Pure will put out compatable software for these 'N' routers.
Seems like that's what everyone is pushing.
Like it or not, seems the future is here. Early !

S

Impressive setup!

I measure 220mbps by using wsttcp.

1. Install on both machines you want to test between.
2. On the first machine type:

wsttcp -r

3. on the 2nd machine type

wsttcp -t -n16000 [ip-addr]

where [ip-addr] is the IP of your first machine.

--
Brett Marl
CTO, Pure Networks
www.networkmagic.com

In my home PC network, we have three personally and individually used PCs (p&i), and 2 communal service PCs (kitchen TV/PC and family room HTPC. One p&i machine (mine) has been wired from the beginning because it rooms in the same room as the cable modem and router. The other four machines were wireless.

After too many lost connections and reboots, we test ran 2 100' cat 6 cables across the house, connecting one from router to a gigabit switch, and the other connecting mine to the switch and back to the router, instead of directly into the router. I suffered no loss whatsover in speed through an on-board gb Lan connection.

The other two p&i machines received $19.99 gb PCI cards (both lost original dial-up modems :-) in the process) and we transfer files and whole directories instantly now.

The Netgear WNR854T will soon replace my Netgear WRT624v3 router, connecting gigabit to gigabit to cable modem. I hear that way there is true 6MBPS cable throughput, and all gb transfers will fly.

To get gb connections working at full speed you have to use cat 6. Fry's electronics sell 1000 feet of it in a box for $169 and we are going to splay it over our basementless ranch house and replace the 2 100 foot cables inside. The remaining 700-800 feet will go to my office for its rewiring.

When we replace a few machines there they will all have that $19.99 card if thet Motherboard does not have on board gigibit LAN. Meanwhile the 2 wireless machines will benefit from increase range of the new router to the older one.

It should all only work as planned. How do you know your actual throughput of 200-220mbps?

If you're interested in a gigabit wired switch then that's a great point. I believe the other router vendors are about to release their draft n routers with gigabit switches also.

Remember that in order to take advantage of those speeds, you need a wired gigabit network card on each PC.

Also, the actual throughput will be affected by how well your wired connections are made. I have a gigabit setup at home, and only get about 220mbps of throughput between PCs. This partly because I have run my own cat5e cable and I lose speed where I have made connections to the patch-panel etc. To get true gigabit you need to make very tight twisted connections.

I will say that 200mbps is plenty fast. I can save large image files on my remote server and it feels like I'm writing to my local disk drive.

Your actual mileage may vary :)

--
Brett Marl
CTO, Pure Networks
www.networkmagic.com

There is another Netgear RangeMax NEXT model the Netgear WNR854T, that has gigabit wired connections. This alone may make it worth upgrading.