If you are looking for smart networking or wireless gear in the home the name Netgear will feature in your discussion somewhere. If it doesn’t it should do as they are one of only a few true home networking Companies who can deliver an all round experience.
A start up company in 1996, Netgear is today a company that is synonymous with networking and wireless for the home and small medium business.
Its offerings have grown from routers, switches, hubs, adapters, print servers, and access points to a new generation of Home Plug adapters that let broadband be streamed to every room in the house, to Skype phones and network attached storage.
One of the most awarded technology companies in the USA, Netgear has recently thrown down the gauntlet in the wireless market with a new media player that is expected to sell in Australia for sub $600.
The Digital Entertainer HD EVA8000, which was revealed at the 2007 CES show, is a new digital media adapter specifically designed to stream HD content from multiple PCs across a home network and to your TV. It has 802.11n WiFi, and has an HDMI port which outputs 1080p.
The Device will also stream internet radio, read RSS feeds, let you schedule programs to record and pause and rewind live TV if your PC has a TV tuner, and even has a “Follow Me” mode that allows you to pause content in one room and resume it in another (if you own more than one Digital Entertainer HD).
In the years that I have been dealing with Netgear both here and overseas it has always been an innovator often launching products ahead of the market.
Long before the likes of Belkin, Netgear was producing smart products in smart packaging and unlike Belkin or Linksys, Netgear is a true small networking company that doesn’t have the likes of Cisco which own Linksys to back it. This means that it has to put more energy into getting it right the first time and then ensuring that the product works long term.
The people behind Netgear are experienced networking executives. Netgear began as a start-up in 1996 as a unit of Bay Networks. In 1998, Nortel Networks bought Bay, but in February, 2002, Nortel dumped its Netgear stake, leaving venture capital and hedge funds as principal owners. They saw the company raise revenues in 2003 by 23%, to $237 million, as home networking got a boost from growth in broadband access. Now, Netgear sees more growth ahead, estimating that the total market for its products may reach more than $500 million this year.
The next generation of Netgear wireless networking devices is now arriving in stores like Harvey Norman and Harris Technology, promising faster data transfers and longer-range service. These new routers and adapters are based on a new standard, 802.11n that will not be formally ratified until next year however despite this it is a standard that is significantly faster than previous G and B standards.
And if you’re in need of a new router now, Netgear’s RangeMax 240 WPNT834 offers speed and range nearly comparable to 802.11n, and is one of my favourite wireless routers for setting up a cable-free home network.
Paired with a RangeMax 240 WPNT511 laptop adapter card, it’s faster than any other wireless system I’ve tried–over 100 megabits per second and in some cases even better than a wired Ethernet network and it delivers coverage to corners of the house where earlier Wi-Fi 802.11b and 11g routers dropped out.
One area where I think Netgear has a big market ahead is in the Home Powerline market. While the IEEE crawls its way to yet another draft of 802.11n, it’s worth remembering that wireless isn’t the only way to get a high-speed network for the home or office. Powerline networking, which uses your existing mains wiring to transmit data, has been quietly improving over the past few years, and the latest standard has reached a top speed of 200Mb/sec. We’ve already seen the first such devices from Netgear and it is in this area where I think Netgear will excel particularly with people who are renovating homes or building a new home and want to get broadband to a difficult area.
Installation simply involves plugging a Netgear Powerline adapter into power sockets, avoiding surge protectors and, ideally, multiway adapters. In recent tests conducted by SmartHouse the Netgear Powerline adapters instantly recognised each other.
The 200Mb/sec figure is purely theoretical, and real-world results aren’t likely to approach this – the speeds we saw were almost identical to previous devices, with our 1GB test folder transferring at an average rate of just under 17Mb/sec. Moving one plug to an adjacent room didn’t affect this speed, and we found no degradation when using a four-way plug adapter.
The Netgear Powerline plugs conform to the Home Plug AV standard, which uses QoS (Quality of Service) to prioritise time-critical data packets, such as those involving VoIP or video streaming. Running a 720p HD video stream caused no problems in any of the situations we tried, although trying to get a second simultaneous stream over the network caused stuttering, which the four-way plug and introduction of interference each made significantly much worse. But for the average house and the user who wants to get data from point a, to point b, this is an ideal solution.
For more on Powerline networking go to: http://www.netgear.com/Solutions/HomeNetworking/PowerlineNetworking.aspx
