Netgear DG834PN is off-the-wall

I woke up the other morning to find my DG834G v1 down, and flashing all it’s lights together at me (Netgear response: “Thank you for your contact. My name is Clueless, and I will be your CSA for this particular instant in time. Does not compute.“)

Since it’s at least 4 years old, has always had a few other problems (Does not reliably send its firewall events via Syslog without crashing, and can’t handle WPA-PSK or anything other than WEP without freezing within a day), I thought it was time to replace it. With what, though? My main criteria were:

• Must have decent wireless
• Must have ADSL modem built-in
• Must look good
• Must wall-mount

So I got the DG834PN.

Except… thanks to some gaps in my research, I found the DG834PN doesn’t wall mount after all. They’ve taken the mounting holes off. Bummer.

OK – so I’ve got that to solve… I will wall mount it, but it may involve some drilling or blu-tack. For that reason, I might see if any of the newer Netgear boxes offer more.
In the meantime, some quick stats. I just quickly tried copying a 705Mb file over wireless, from my IBM Thinkpad T60p with built-in (ie. non-RangeMAX) wireless, in the same room, 4m away – and ran each test twice. The average speeds were:

• On DG834G using WEP-128 bit : 7 min 10 secs
• On DG834PN using WPA-PSK:     4 min 50 secs

So… approx a 30% improvement.

So – I might keep it. We’ll see