Linksys introduces many types of wireless routers – the new E series including E1200 N300, E1500 N300 – a faster one with Speed-Boost technology, E2500 N600, E3200 N600 and the fastest one E4200 N750 routers. All the new E Series were shipped around 1st quarter of 2011. But the WNDR3700 N600 was shipped 2nd quarter of 2009. What main differences between the two routers?
Basically the two routers have nearly the same features. The table 1 shows the main manufacturers specs between the Linksys E3200 Series Vs Netgear WNDR3700 routers.
Wireless Technology
Both routers support simultaneous dual band technology with each band delivers the same speeds of up to 300Mbps what we call the N600 technology (300Mbps + 300Mbps). The new wireless N technology can deliver the speeds from 150Mbps up to 450mbps (with three spatial data streaming). Linksys and Netgear have shipped the new wireless N750 technology (450Mbps + 300Mbps) i.e. Linksys E4200 and Netgear WNDR4000.
Ethernet Ports
Both Linksys E3200 and WNDR3700 are integrated with gigabit Ethernet ports in their LAN (4x) and WAN (1x) interfaces. If you have many computers with gigabit NIC adapter, you can take advantage of connecting them directly to the Gigabit router’s ports for fast and reliable wired connection. Both routers include one gigabit WAN port. Can this gigabit WAN port improve your internet performance? Basically your modem and router cannot improve the performance of your internet connectivity experiences except you upgrade your broadband plan from the ISP. But modem with Gigabit Ethernet port can improve the performance of data throughput between the modem and the router (with gigabit WAN port). Use broadband modem with Gigabit port for example Surfboard SBG6120 DOCSIS 3 cable modem.
USB Port
To support your home theater environment, the capability of hosting an external USB storage is very important to let you stream the multimedia files from the storage to your home theater devices including your XBOX gaming console, Blu-Ray player, Internet TV and so on. WNDR3700 with Ready-Share USB storage is DLNA certified meaning you can assure that the router can connect to any DLNA-compliant devices seamlessly. Linksys E3200 includes Cisco Connect Software to let you easily manage the devices connect to the router. You can also easily manage the router configuration including the guest network and other wireless experiences.
Unfortunately both routers can not be used to share the USB printer. You need to buy separate print-server for shared printer. But if you really require the router that capable of hosting both shared storage and printer at the same time, you can consider the new Asus RT-N56U Black Diamond which includes two USB ports.
Guest network
Mostly new generation of wireless routers today support Guest network. With Guest network feature you can create separate SSID with different password than yours to allow you grant internet access to your guests without exposing your local network resources to your guests. Linksys E Series include one Guest network while you can create one guest network each band on WNDR3700 N600 router.
| Linksys E3200 | Netgear WNDR3700 | |
|---|---|---|
| Wireless Technology | N600 with 6x internal antennas – MIMO technology | N600 with internal antennas |
| Ethernet Ports | Gigabit | Gigabit |
| USB Port | Yes for storage | Yes for storage and is DLNA-certified |
| Guest Network | Yes, one | Yes, each band |
| Customer Ratings in Amazon | averagely four out of five stars customer ratings for connectivity, value for money and wireless | averagely four out of five stars customer ratings for ease of installation, ease of setup, ease of use and features |
| Retail Price | $ 149.99 | $159.99 |
Other standard features are the same including the NAT and SPI (for threats protection), DHCP server (ease of managing the IP address to the clients), VPN pass-through and WPA/WPA2 wireless encryption.
- Default IP address for Linksys E3200 is 192.168.1.1 with user admin, password “admin”.
- Default IP address for WNDR3700 is 192.168.0.1 with user admin, password “password”
Linksys introduces new version of E4200V2 – a new N900 router technology. It is enhanced for HD streaming and gaming and is capability of hosting USB printing.
Connection Diagram
Both wireless routers can be connected as shown in the above figure. It shows Netgear router which connects to the modem to get internet service and couple of home theater devices.
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