This router came free with my Orange Home Broadband when I was still with the company last year.

My first impressions of the router was its style as I hadn't set it up yet. From this visual inspection, it looks very good. The router was a stylist black gloss with rounded edges, it was small and therefore didn't take up space on my desk. When I am not at my desk the lights are about eye level with where I sit so I could easily tell the status of the router from afar which, for me, was very helpful - other routers I have had have had lights on the very top and therefore you have to be above the router to read the status - I do not like this.

When I began setting up up, the trouble started. I spend most of my day working with computers, I am a self-confessed computer geek, but even I have trouble setting this router up. This was partly Orange's fault so this sis not help the situation but the router's setup pages were dreadful too. Horrible to navigate and rather confusing at times. With NETGEAR being one of the dominant brands in the router market I was expecting a much more polished interface.

Once I finally got the router set up (after a couple of HOURS!), I decided to test the range. I wish I hadn't. My router is in an upstairs room which is very close to the stairs themselves and the router is by the door in that room. If I go downstairs, the router signal dropped to about 20% - very poor.

If in the same room, the router works pretty well, the connection to the router (NOT to the internet - this is irrelevant to the router) was as good as any other router.

One of the things I hated was that the router didn't seem to be compatible with many of the services I wanted to use online. One example was a game called "DC Universe: Online" - I had been in lengthy discussions with both Orange and NETGEAR before being told that the router was not compatible. This happened with multiple other services too and made me switch to another as soon as I could.