By Ki Grinsing

Overview

The Netgear WGR614 becomes legacy router which the speed is limited up to only 54Mbps. For sharing the internet and or simple networking tasks including wireless printing using the wireless printer adapter and sharing documents the wireless G network is enough. However, should you demand high performance network for HD video streaming and smooth gaming, wireless G router will not perform optimally and it is likely to perform jitter and lag.

Upgrade solution

What is your option to upgrade this router for high performance network? The main specifications of WGR614 router are as follows:

• Compliant with Wireless G standard with the speed up to 54Mbps with single 2.4GHz band
• Four 10/100-LAN Ethernet ports and 1×10/100 WAN port
• Security: WPA/WPA2-PSK and WEP; NAT & SPI; DoS attack prevention and free live parental control

This router is ideal for shared internet; shared documents; email and chat.  Now, to support high performance environment for high responsive gaming and HD video streaming, this router is not appropriate anymore unless you will experience jitter and lag performance. Which router you should upgrade to? You have many options, but you should find the router with solid connection and is powered by wireless N600 or N750 technology.

WNDR3700 V3 Wireless N600 Router

Since the main point upgrading / replacing your aging router is to have high performance wireless network to support your home theater devices connect to the internet wirelessly and yet performing in their best for streaming HD video, the network should be solid and high speed as well as clean network.

Features

WNDR3700 N600 simultaneous dual band router is ideal solution to this stage knowing that the router is designed with the following main features to support your home theater devices:

• N600 technology with speeds up to 300Mbps each band simultaneously
• Support video QoS
• Gigabit Ethernet ports for both LAN and WAN interfaces
• USB port for shared storage with built-in media server with DLNA compliant to assure the router works seamlessly with any DLNA compliant devices including Blu-Ray player, XBOX 360, HDTV etc

How the customers provide reviews for this router? Averagely 3.8 out of five stars customer ratings in Amazon.

For faster speed, you can consider the new WNDR4000 N750 wireless router designed with three spatial data streams for speed up to 450Mbps in 5GHz band.

Asus RT-N56U Black Diamond

With the same N600 technology, you can also consider upgrading WGR614 wireless G router to the newest Asus router product RT-N56U N600 router. Why this router?

Features

You can find the same features as the WNDR3700 router including the following main features:

• N600 simultaneous dual band technology. You know that the doubling the bandwidth of your network is beneficial since you can accommodate all of your mix wireless clients that work either in 2.4GHz or 5GHz band
• As opposed to WNDR3700 with 16MB flash and 64MB RAM, the Asus RT-N56U is powered by 8Mb flash and 128MB RAM. With more RAM the router should process faster
• Gigabit Ethernet interfaces
• And the main difference is that Asus RT-N56U comes with twin USB ports. You can host both storage and printer concurrently to support your shared multimedia storage and printing jobs can be done easily.

If you expect the router to support Guest network to segregate your network, you will be disappointed that this RT-N56U doesn’t support guest network.

Upgrade your WGR614 wireless G router to new generation of wireless N600 or N750 router for best performing the streaming and gaming.