Netgear Wireless Travel Router Review (pics)

by Kevin O'Brien

This is a review of the Netgear WGR101 portable travel router. When I first received this router after shipping, I really wasn't expecting something this small. The Netgear WGR101 is deck of cards small, palm of your hands small, heck...blue jean back pocket small. Measuring in at 4" x 2.75" x .75, this baby packs a punch that some full size routers can't hold up to. It also comes with its own small zip-up toiletry style case for travel storage. Inside holds a few quick reference sheets, a small ethernet cable, its AC adapter, and the router itself.

Everything in the box -- except for the diet coke, that's there for size comparison (view larger image)

Netgear WGR101 Travel Router bottom view(view larger image)

Netgear WGR101 underside view (view larger image)

To start off I will try to explain the unique setup of this router. For simplicity Netgear designed this so that someone could plug it in, and almost never have to go into the router to change settings. It has a very cool switch on the side that allows you to lock the unit out to all but one wireless device, another position for multiple devices, and another for setup mode. Setup mode allows you to connect your laptop through a LAN cable and change any of the settings just incase something isn't working right. One example is if you are in a busy wireless area, and the default frequency already has a network in place. This way you can adjust those settings without any outside interference. While you can still log into the router wirelessly through the other two modes, it just gives you another option incase things aren't working out for you.

Netgear WGR101 Travel Router left side view (view larger image)

Netgear WGR101 travel bag with coke can for size comparison (view larger image)

Along with the default mode which has the router working as its own DHCP server, you can turn this off and use it as a standard access point. This comes in handy if you want to access shared folder or other devices on the network, and not worry about conflicts from being in another "zone". The only odd bad part about this feature is that I was only able to connect through the router with it in the first "single user" switch position. I did not have another wireless device with me to double-check this and verify if it would only allow one user to connect through it at that time. I am guessing since its DHCP server was off, that it would allow as many devices to come through as the main router on that LAN would support.

No matter if the unit was in access point mode, or working with its own internal DHCP server enabled, you can run full WPA encryption. Setup for this was very simple, and it had almost no speed impact or connection time increase. You also have the option for the older WEP standard, but why bother using that anymore?

Performance and Benchmarks

After playing around with the features, I decided to put it head to head with my spare Linksys 802.11B BEFW11S4. To add another challenge I used the smallest Wifi card I could find, being my Trendnet 802.11B USB stick (it was free after rebate, don't ask). This thing has an internal antenna the length of a match, so it would make the router fight with it for reception.

At 30 feet away, through one interior wall both the Linksys and the Netgear were at full strength reception. To get an accurate speed test I logged onto the dslreports.com and picked and open server for the run. I would turn off one router, and then run the speed test. After I was done with the first one, I would switch over to give the other one a try. This was done 3 times with each, and I averaged the results out. The Linksys averaged a 274.75kbps up / 1494.5 kbps down, with the Netgear travel router averaging 275.33kbps up / 1569.7kbps down. The Netgear which is roughly 5 times smaller than the Linksys, no external antennas ended up beating it by almost a 100kbps down. Now remember, this was only testing on the 802.11B range, so results will definitely be much better using the faster speed. Hopefully soon I can steal my friend's router, and put this head to head against his modified wrt54gs, and see which can get the better overall speeds.

Pricing and Availability: Netgear WGR101 portable travel router

Size comparison of coke can to Netgear wireless travel router (view larger image)

 

That's an incredibly small router! Nice review, good tests.

I might have to pick up one of those myself. I'm in need of a travel router, but haven't had the motivation to get up and get one...

Thanks for the review

 

Brian got one of these, it is nice, we used it last year when in Las Vegas and had to share a hotel room LAN connection among multiple people sharing a couple of rooms -- all big dorks with wi-fi capable laptops, pdas, phones...and whatever else. It's truly a great travel companion, but also just great for at home and keeping the router hidden instead of having one of those giant alien antenna devices in the corner of the room.

 

Yea, thats me if you could update the username on it

 

ahha, the right guy is now associated to the review, sorry about that. nice job...do you really own 6 volvos and a pocket router?

 

Personally own 2, my parents/brother own the rest. Lots o volvos in the driveway

EDIT: What happened to my massive 8.3MP images

 

while i appreciated the large images you submitted for the review, we can't share them with the rest of the web because our bandwidth, along with most of people that visit this site, would suffer greatly trying to download those

 

Great Router Review Mr. Volos!

I enjoyed reading it and ill probaly read it a couple times over and over.
I should be having a review made soon for linksys routers.

 

Good review. I had no idea Netgear had a travel router available. Right now, I'm wired to the desk in a hotel room and was thinking about buying a Linksys travel router. I may now have to rethink my choices.

 

Oh yea, popped the sucker open tonight. Turns out to be quite similar in nature to the wrt54g in a few parts. Has 32 megs of ram (more than my other routers), and Netgear offers a package to code your own software for it (all under the GPL). Below are some picture of the circuit board.

 

nice review - i see your keeping busy until your new notebook arrives

 

wow, 32MB in that thing is generous...I think you forgot to mention in the article how much you paid for this router, you told me via email something like $10 after rebates right? That'd be an insane deal.

 

OT: abaxter - are you the owner of this site?

 

I prefer to say I run it with the other admin guy Brian. owns makes it sound all worklike and businessy, it's just a hobby that got carried away. lol. the content is mostly member driven as exampled by this review. and then i spend a lot of time coding/maintaining/editing the site and reviewing laptops. many people here are far smarter and informed than i am about notebook technology, for instance this router review by own6volvos is more thoughtful that what i could have done.

 

9 bucks after rebate. Was down from 79.99 from compusa. They give you a programmer thing to make your own ASP webpages for the thing completely custom. My first attempt thought ended with about a half an hour of frantic trying to log in, and finally flashing back to the stock one. Maybe I just ened to look around and try to find some tested custom firmware. Right now though it works great as is.

 

I got one I'll sell ... it's 11 months and only used twice. The real test of this type of product is when you have a problem
and how they handle it. Netgear doesn't handle it ! They farm it out. Talk to the service guy what he thinks of Netgear.
So it's for sale .. Here's what I have in it:
my company network guy spent 3 hr trouble shooting @ $75 p/hr.
$35. Netgear farmed out service tech
$60. new now @ $320.00 I'm not sure it works.

 

Everybody has different experiences, both good and bad...unfortunately, looks like you got the short end of the stick. Sorry to hear about that.

 

nice review, is it possible to use it as a repeater? I've been looking all over for something small that can act as a repeater.

 

Muahahaha, just set mine up with an external antenna from a linksys router I had laying around. Reception is much better, and soon it will have a really nice omni antenna on it.

So far here is the main perks and downsides of this unit:

Pro:
Super small and nice. Easily hacked for much greater range

Con:
To have it work as a normal pass through access point, where your own network assigns an IP instead of the unit itself, you can only have one device connected. You can't get it to work for more than one computer.

You can still have a lot of users connect to it when its using its own internal dhcp, but if you want to share files with computers on the other network, it makes it very difficult as it is on a different subnet. I am going to see if there is a software fix for this, as it looks like there might be.

 

UPDATE: Setting the ip range correctly for the 2nd DHCP server made everything butter. Now I can have lots of connections through the netgear thing, and still connect to devices on my home wired network.

Basically..

Home network: 192.168.0.100-150
Wireless through Netgear: 192.168.1.100-150

Resolving computer names to connect to things doesn't work perfectly yet, but just typing in their IP address makes it all work again perfectly. Maybe after the computer learns the that "IP" = name again, network computer names might work once more.

This thing is amazing