To attract home users, router manufacturers have to keep setup and maintenance simple, while also walking the very thin line between charging more than consumers will pay—which isn't a lot—and cutting features beyond what they'll accept. The $110 (street) Netgear RangeMax Dual Band Wireless-N (WNDR3300) certainly succeeds on price, especially considering its ability to operate in both the 2.4- and 5-GHz bands, but whether it makes the grade overall depends on your home-networking needs and your expertise. The designers streamlined both setup and the features set in an attempt to keep things simple and cheap. The result isn't bad, but it'll please some users better than others.

Despite the price, the matte-black box is surprisingly attractive—a large Netgear logo on the top glows blue when the router is powered on and also contains flashing LEDs that let you know when each of the eight (yes, eight!) internal antennas is passing traffic. If you find that more annoying than attractive, you can shut off the display by simply pressing on the blue logo. The status lights on the front are of the standard speed-and-activity variety. The back has one Internet port for your broadband modem and four LAN Ethernet ports. These last are 10/100, not gigabit, and that's a bit of a problem for me. Even though I like the price, I'd rather pay a little more for something like the D-Link DIR-855 or even the 2.4GHz-only SMC Barricade than drop the wired portion of my home net down to 10/100. Home networks that need 802.11n wireless speed are going to want more from their wired ports as well. Sticking with 10/100 at this point just doesn't make much sense. I might have also been disappointed at the absence of a USB port for connecting a hard drive or printer, but for this little dough, I wouldn't expect one.

Setup is a more positive note, being both fast and easy. Just run Netgear's included setup CD on any PC connected to one of the router's wired ports and a wizard walks you through most of the basics, including connecting your hardware, naming your wireless network, choosing a wireless mode (2.4-Ghz, 5-GHz, or mixed mode), and setting up wireless security. You'll then get a summary of what you just configured along with the option to print it out (highly recommended). I'm not quite sure why you can't save the summary info to a file, though. Sure, you could cut the info and paste it into a file, but a save-to-file option seems like a no-brainer. I was also surprised that the wizard gave me no help at all in setting up the wired network—no questions on whether I wanted a different IP addressing scheme, no router-access queries, not even an option to reset the default admin password! You'll only find options for that in the day-to-day Web management interface.

That might throw newbies, too, because the wizard doesn't transfer you to the router's day-to-day management interface. It just stops and you need to hunt up the management URL from the docs. For people like me, whose twisted life paths have left them configuring lots of wireless routers, figuring out where to go is easy. Normally adjusted folks, however, will need to dig into the router's docs to figure out how to finish the configuration—and there'll be plenty left to do if you're looking for more than the basic setup.

On the upside, Netgear has outfitted the WNDR3300 with its standard home-router operation and management firmware. That means you've got access to a full SPI firewall and content filtering, the ability to broadcast or not your wireless SSID, and even the ability to favor certain kinds of traffic, like gaming or voice-over-IP.

All this is straightforward if you've got experience with router management utilities, but I didn't find it especially easy for inexperienced users. Netgear has tried to make some things easier, one example being quality of service (QoS) capability. Unlike D-Link and SMC, Netgear didn't opt to license either StreamEngine (a game QoS technology) or WISH (Wireless Intelligent Stream Handling), instead building its own nicely intuitive QoS interface. You can give certain types of traffic preference simply by clicking on the type in a laundry list the interface presents.

While that's fine for the Skype, Vonage, or straight VoIP phone options, the online game choices on the list might as well not have been there. They included selections like Everquest and Quake 3—none of the new games kids are playing now. To keep their traffic from being interrupted, you'll need to understand not just QoS as a technical concept, you'll also need to know which TCP/IP ports your game uses so you can manually build a QoS rule. Is Netgear's QoS better or worse than the StreamEngine/WISH combination? Odds are your home network will never run enough traffic to find out.

As to the management interface, it's a fact of life. The wizard gets your wireless network up and running, but only just. Folks looking to make the best use of the WNDR3300 will need to understand the management interface regardless.—Next: RangeMax on the Testing Range