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These devices have several characteristics that are attractive and others that are significantly less than desirable. I liked it's price and the fact that it's operating system was made by Sonicwall. After using it I was also very pleased with the overall performance and reliability. In fact, my internet speed increased over using a low-end Linksys and I haven't had to reboot it once from the time I set it up. For that alone, it has quite a bit of bang for the buck. In the past I've used a similar product from nearly every mainstream brand and have found the FR314's overall options, simplicity, and interface to be top-notch and of a very professional level. It can be set to a NAT or a transparent Router, NAT server routing options are more than plentiful, it can be a DHCP and DNS server, and it has many higher-end functions such as VPN-Passthrough and URL/keyword filtering. On the hardware end, it has a high performance 4 port switch, is not too big, and creates very little heat. The overall specs look great on paper... Netgear made some choices in the design of the FR314 that may make a business user think twice, however, these designs may not bother the average home user. In the forefront, the fact that you are limited to a maximum of 8 simultaneous users causes a lot of people to screech their tires. Also, the content filtering will only do it's advertised duties of filtering out websites that contain things like profanity, partial nudity, full nudity, political daftness, ect., if you PAY for it. You may also have more than 8 users if you PAY for it. The FR314 can also be a VPN-Endpoint server if you PAY for it. Netgear made this router to be feature rich for the general user yet very expensive for the person that doesn't fit in the middle of the bell curve. This router is now old enough for Netgear to have dropped support for it. I called Netgear about enabling some of these pay-for options and quickly found that I was on a quest for something unobtainable. 1 sales person and 3 tech support people were quick to give me a canned response that flashing to the latest firmware would enable all of the features yet, they were completely unable to understand that you still must enter an activation code for certain features, regardless of the firmware version in use. Perhaps if I too had a thick Indian accent, I could have communicated this across. There are several 3rd party websites that will sell you activation codes for ridiculously high prices. If you need more support for this item than a firmware download, PDF of the manual, or other information than what's available from Netgear's website, you will likely become very frustrated such as I did. Luckily, very little ever goes wrong with this particular device. Overall, I'd say that this device is a great buy for someone that isn't doing complicated networking, doesn't have more than 8 computers, doesn't want to spend a lot of money yet, wants something that will work for years without worry, and needs something that will keep out hackers and internet worms, all while being simple and straightforward to setup. -HowieComputingRead full review
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