NETGEAR BR500-100NAS - Discontinued by Manufacturer

Two reasons to buy – Speed and Remote AccessI recently upgraded to 500 mg internet with my local provider RCN. With my 6 year old Netgear ProSafe router I could only get 40 mg throughput. After installing the Netgear BR500 I get 350 plus mb / second on the same internet connection. Bottom line, old routers don’t have the processing power to get over 35 mg per connection. The BR500 is a super powerful router that can handle over 900mb per sec.What I love about the BR500 is that I use several Windows Programs that are quite large, so much that I don’t want to load them on my laptop. Using the BR500 VPM with remote access I can easily use these programs from anywhere in the world. My wife and I both used logmein for years, originally for free, then paid version. Logmein kept jacking the price up and now I can’t be more delighted not to be dependent on them and pay their exorbitant monthly fees.A few pointers before starting:Don’t buy a used BR500. Once they are registered it is impossible to reregister in your own name without the previous owner’s permission. If you cannot locate the previous owner it impossible to purchase tech support.If you have two locations make sure you use different subnets such as 192.168.1.xxx and 192.168.2.xxx You cannot use the same subnet at both locations.Although I understand networking, I had to call Netgear’s support to configure the VPN. Netgear support is excellent. They always answer the phone and have always solved my problems. Don’t get discouraged if you don’t find the interface intuitive. It’s highly likely you will need to call Netgear support to configure the VPN the first time. Expect to do so.Sometimes the VPN goes down. Once it happened because AT&T at our office location did a software upgrade on their Cable Modem/Router and turned off the pass through mode. Another time it went down because Netgear did a server upgrade on their end and knocked us off until we rebooted the router.I have a back door into my home and office computers using Parallels remote Access for $19 per year. I say this because if the VPN goes down I can still get into a local computer, log in to the BR500 locally and reboot it. Rebooting the router(s) solves the VPN problems 95 percent of the time.The best part about using Windows Remote Desktop over a vpn instead of parallels access or logmein is that most all the windows hotkeys work the same, such as Alt-tab etc. Many of these hot keys are disabled in other remote access programs. It’s wonderful to not have to load and maintain a copy of all your software on your laptop.I bought a $279 HP i3 laptop computer and loaded the BR500 remote access (Insight VPN client for windows) software on it. That’s the only program I have on the laptop besides a browser and Windows Remote access. Great piece of mind knowing I not carrying around all kinds of information I don’t want stolen.Very easy to get hooked on RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol) through the BR500 vpn. I’m loving it.Feb 2, 2020. After running a point to point ipsec vpn between home and office I have now switched to the Insight vpm. For some reason the point to point was dropping. Got on the phone with tech support and we got rid of the ipsec point to point and configured a vpn through Insight. All is good now.Tip - Use Insight Vpn instead of trying to configure your own in the router.

I bought this with the idea in mind that I wanted to use the OpenVPN capabilities, as well as some other features.When I did get the VPN to work, it was intermittent and clunky at best and threw errors left and right... I would attach pictures but IP addresses were everywhere and I honestly did not feel like editing photos for hours. I have to agree with the statement that this router is half done and is being used to make money. I hate it when game developers put out half baked games, I really hate it when hardware developers/engineers do it.Pros- Nice looking case, small and compact. Comes with brackets for mounting in my Server Rack.- Password recovery feature with security Challenge questions is nice. But I would questions your network admins skills if he needs this ability...- Nice looking GUI, graphics and pictures are in an HTML unlike the old JAVA display with older switches and routers. -Security and VLAN setup portions of GUI are pretty easy to use and self explanatory. -IPTV and Dynamic DNS features are as you would expect. -OPEN VPN Service window has not changed from other NETGEAR products. -UPNP features are as would expected on any other router. -Backup settings, Traffic Meter, and Firmware Update menus are typical as well.Cons- Wall wart power supply. Might be nice for a home user, but in a business class, I personally would expect a C-13 plug.- Interface lights and ports jacks are on opposite sides making the indicators useless when mounted in my Server Rack.- GUI has a lot of wasted space. - Port Status - This sorta makes up for the fact you cannot see the front... but is no help if I am standing at the rack. - Network Map has pages that draw images of machines connected in groups of 10.. Annoying unless you have less than 10 devices. It doesn't actually show a real network map... they should have left it as a list.. - Current Status & WAN Traffic Circles. I am ok with these.. but eh... looks more like something from a home router and not a business class router. - Throughput Charts in GUI -Probably the best thing on the Dashboard. But displays every 5 seconds with a 50 sec window.. would have been better to have 24-48hr tracking with a dropdown resolution to allow you to drill down. I would be more interested in the outlook over a great time span first, then focus in to see suspect ports traffic. - Attached Devices - The list I expect to see, but makes the Network map pointless.. plus this list cannot be modified/customized in any way (i.e. Icons, and descriptions) - VPN features are supposed to be easy, but it has been extremely intermittent at best. I have the services turned on but it still says access to VPN not available... wtf... I gave up and went back to using true VPN servers which this was supposed to replace and make my footprint smaller. My old ASUS RT-N66U had a better VPN setup. -Firewall - Just not impressed with Traffic Rules and Access Controls, the rest is as would be expected on any other router. - QoS Setup. This menu looks pretty straight forward until you try to do the Speed test feature to characterize your internet and it wigs out and pops up a window stating it cannot run the test a million times until you get angry and restart the router. -Logs. sigh... so many false positives and garbage captured. At first glance it looks like I was under a barrage from clusters of hackers attempting DoS attacks. Plus it only displays messages from that day.

This product wasn’t able to give me what I want for the business I have. So I return it.