Cyberoam Netgenie review

The rest of the router’s interface is well designed and very easy to use; there’s no QoS, apart from a blanket limit for upload and download rates for the router, but the port forwarding and wireless networking interfaces are well designed. You can plug a 3G USB modem into the router’s USB port to share a 3G connection; to get a 3 Premium Broadband dongle to work we just had to type in the three.co.uk APN and add *99# as the dial-up number; you can find settings for other networks at http://tinyurl.com/644hdz.

The router’s admin settings – click to enlarge

Unfortunately, the router was slow in our file transfer tests. When testing with a Centrino laptop, at 1m range we saw just 27.1Mbit/s, while at 10m this dropped to 5.9Mbit/s and at 25m a crawling 2.1Mbit/s. Cyberoam doesn’t have its own USB dongle, but when we tested with a Dynamode WL-700N-MRT (£6 from www.scan.co.uk) we saw a large improvement to 27.1Mbit/s at 10m; unfortunately, we couldn’t hold a signal at 25m using the Dynamode dongle.

Cyberoam’s NetGenie router is a good idea that generally does a good job of filtering content for the various members of your family – it makes sense to do this at the router level, as it will then apply to any device that connects to the wireless network, whether it’s a laptop, a tablet or a smartphone. All this comes at a price, though; it’s the same price as some premium dual-band routers, and the NetGenie is a slow single-band model. Also, after three years you’ll need to buy a further £89 subscription to keep your website categories and virus definitions up to date.