3 out of 3 people found this review helpful.
Great specifications. Bugs galore
Date of Review: Oct 4, 2005
The Bottom Line: Netgear is clearly incapable of producing routers. Their products continue to be ridden with bugs. Their customer support is slow and incompetent.
We purchased a Netgear FVS338 to replace an FVS318 in our main office. The 338 increases the number of supported VPN's from 8 to 50 due to its faster 266 MHz processor and the 338 includes a dial back-up connector that is not present on the FVS318.
We have used multiple FVS318 routers (Version 1) over the last two years to create gateway VPN's from our main office to employee home broadband connections. The FVS318 V1 routers have a rock solid VPN that has enabled our employees to easily work from home.
The ultra-reliable FVS318 V1 has been 'improved' to the FVS318 V3. The FVS318 V3 is now incredibly unreliable: the VPN's die and cannot be restarted without a hard reboot of the FVS318 V3. So we decided to upgrade to the FVS338 since the FVS318 has been ruined by Netgear. Unfortunately, it appears the FVS338 shares the same code base with the FVS318 V3 and consequently is plagued by numerous bugs.
What's broken in the FVS338:
1) The VPN. The VPN is highly unreliable: it goes up and down like a yoyo. As a user of the FVS318 V1 VPN, I am quite disappointed to see Netgear can't get the FVS338 VPN to work right. And since the latest version of the FVS318 (V3) is broken, it appears no reliable VPN can now be purchased through Netgear.
2) DHCP. The FVS338 randomly quits handing out IP addresses and requires a reboot of the FVS338 regularly. This well known problem makes the router totally useless.
3) DHCP reserved machine names. If you ask the FVS338 to hand out IP addresses based on the MAC of the device, the FVS338 will not let you name the machine. It insists on naming all reserved machines 'none'. Since we use reserved machine addresses for all our printers, servers, and laptops this bug makes it extremely difficult to manage the various machines distributed throughout a small office.
What works:
The FVS338 sucks power well. Since DHCP is broken and the VPN is broken, I have no idea why anyone could use this terrible product in any situation.
As an owner of multiple FVS318 V1 boxes, I was hopeful this would be a great replacement for the FVS318 since Netgear broke the FVS318 when it redesigned it into the FVS318 V3. Instead, Netgear now makes no reliable VPN router. The fact that Netgear could take the rock solid FVS318 V1 and replace it with the buggy FVS318 V3 and FVS338 is a testament to Netgear's never-ending quality problems.
Netgear is a company that simply does not deserve future consideration. Their software quality control and abysmal support eventually should lead to their demise. Any company that can take a rock solid product like the FVS318 V1 and turn it into a piece of junk like the FVS318 V3 and the FVS338 should be shot.
