Apple airport Extreme base station is very popular among wireless N600 routers available in the market today which receives averagely 4.4 out of five star customer ratings. No wonder that the price is above any other new wireless routers today. Each time there is a new router introduction; many people try to compare it with Apple Airport Extreme N600. No matter the router class is technically above the Apple Airport such as Linksys with its E4200 N750 and Netgear with its WNDR4000 N750 router, they keep looking for the spec differences.

The comparison between Netgear WNDR4000 N750 Vs Apple Airport Extreme will not result many differences as Linksys E4200 Vs Apple Airport. The table below shows main manufacturer’s spec between WNDR4000 and Apple Airport and the customer ratings from the Amazon.

Wireless Technology

Basically the two routers are designed with different wireless speed technology. The Netgear WNDR4000 is categorized into N750 wireless technology meaning double bandwidth up to 750Mbps (450Mbps in 5GHz band + 300Mbps in 2.4GHz band) using three spatial data streaming. Basically Netgear WNDR4000, WNDR37Av and WNDR3700 have the same performance regarding the processor and memory. They are powered by 680 MHz MIPS 32-bit processor and with 8 MB flash and 64 MB RAM.  Except the premium edition WNDR3800, the memory is doubled: 16Mb flash and 128MB RAM.

Click for spec details

The Apple Airport is designed with N600 wireless technology with each band speeds up to 300Mbps doubling the bandwidth up to 600Mbps let you connect up to 50 wireless clients simultaneously. Not sure how the wireless performance when all the 50 users with high-intensive bandwidth applications running at the same time, probably the wireless performance can degrade significantly.

Ethernet Ports

Like other high performance wireless routers, both WNDR4000 and Apple Airport Extreme include gigabit Ethernet ports in both LAN and WAN interfaces. But Apple Airport has the shortage Gigabit LAN ports (3x) as opposed to 4x ports for WNDR4000. Many users don’t agree with the shortage of the LAN ports but mostly users don’t matter with 3 LAN ports. I think 3-ports for wired connection is adequate for home environment.

USB Port

The usage of USB port is the main difference between the two routers. WNDR4000 can only host shared storage attached to the USB port. On the other hand, Apple Airport has more extensibility functions than just shared storage. You can add a USB hub to let you connect both storage and printer accessible across the network concurrently. You cannot host shared printer for WNDR4000.

Both routers support built-in media server, but WNDR4000 is DLNA certified to let you connect to any other DLNA compliant devices seamlessly.

Guest Network

Even though both routers support guest network, not many users are aware that they can enable the guest network to segregate the network for their guests to get internet access only without compromising the security of your private network resources. WNDR4000 allows you create guest network each band but Apple Airport supports only one guest network.

for small environment, you may also consider Apple airport express – new generation or you may consider all-in-one Asus WL330N3G.

What about the customer ratings? You can see from the table that averagely WNDR4000 receives 3.5 out of five star customer ratings as opposed to 4.4 out of five stars for Apple Airport Extreme.

The figure 2 shows networking diagram for Apple Airport Extreme that you can apply to WNDR4000 too except the shared printer. You can use the multi-port wireless media bridge such as Buffalo WLI-TX4-AG300N dual band Ethernet converter with four Ethernet ports to let you connect up to four home theater devices to the router wirelessly.

Next generation of Netgear wireless router is WNDR4700 N900 media router which includes internal storage.

See also:

1. Best Wireless Router For iPad 2
2. High Performance Simultaneous Dual Band Router
3. Top ten wireless routers for high-performance home wireless network
4. Best wireless router for gaming – with dual band
5. Wireless N600 comparison chart