Netgear D6200 review

If you’re after a small, inconspicuous router to sit in the corner of your sitting room, the Netgear D6200 is not for you. It’s a rectangular black wedge a little larger than hardback book and sits upright on an integrated stand. It’s a little expensive, but you get a lot of features. The D6200 supports 802.11ac 5GHz Wi-Fi with a theoretical maximum throughput of 867Mbit/s, as well as the 2.4GHz band still used by many mobile devices and laptops.

The D6200 has both an ADSL modem and a Gigabit Ethernet WAN port, so you don’t have to throw away your router if you switch to a cable or VDSL service. There are also four Gigabit Ethernet LAN ports and a USB port, which can be used to attach an external hard disk or use the router as a USB print server. A power button and recessed reset switch are positioned alongside the ports at the back of the router, while buttons to start a WPS connection and enable or disable the Wi-Fi are on the right-hand side of the device

At the front, illuminated icons on the glossy black surface show you the status of the router’s various features and connections. The wireless connection is secured by default, with a strong but easily human-readable password. When you first connect to the router’s IP address, it’ll help you establish an internet connection. Like the mobile and desktop monitor apps Netgear provides, the web interface uses the Netgear Genie branding and icon set.

However, we found that it could be rather slow in responding, particularly if it failed to detect an active internet connection. We also found that some aspects of the interface felt disjointed. For example, clicking on Parental Controls takes you to a download site where Mac OS and Windows users can download an OpenDNS content filtering plugin. Even once you’ve set up filtering, you can’t access its control screen directly from the router, but instead have to run an application on your PC.

Some confusing aspects but the web interface largely does a good job

The web interface’s advanced options screen is better and gives you access to a wide range of features, including wireless guest networks, blacklisting for specific sites, setting up a VPN and using a built-in DLNA media server to share content on an attached USB disk.

We tested the router’s simultaneous dual-band Wi-Fi using our laptop’s integrated wireless chipset and a Netgear A6100 USB Wi-Fi adaptor. In our standard 2.4GHz test, the results of our throughput tests were fairly close, but the laptop’s own wireless chipset did a little better, getting 45.8Mbit/s at 1m, 45.9Mbit/s at 10m and 11.8Mbit/s at 20m. The A6100 failed the 20m test. In the 5GHz test, the positive difference between n and ac really began to show. While our laptop did reasonably well, getting 76.3Mbit/s at 1m, 74.1Mbit/s at 10m and 13.1Mbit/s at 20m, the USB dongle gave us 139.8Mbit/s at 1m, 135.8Mbit/s at 10m and a spectacular 48.4Mbit/s at 20m.

This router’s flexible WAN connection options and good performance in our wireless tests are both points in its favour, but we found its interface to be a little disjointed, particularly when it came to optional elements such as content filtering. It’s a good router, but the BT Home Hub 5 has a better interface, even though it doesn’t have as many features as the D6200.