Netgear wndr7av, wndr3700, wndr3400

[thiggins]

I received an email asking about this new product:

Hello SmallNetBuilder! Thank you for an extremely useful site. I am writing about the new WNDR37AV router that has shown up on Netgear's product pages. It seems to have identical specs to the WNDR3700 and is being marketed as a router for gaming and video. There is all kinds of speculation on Netgear's forums about this here: http://forum1.netgear.com/showthread.php?t=52714

Some are mad because it may be a case of fixing hardware problems with a new model. Others feel it's just marketing and say Netgear is just changing the branding on their consumer routers. Even others are claiming that it's the same hardware but will have some features that will be firmware locked and not available on the 3700.

Anyway, any light you can shed on this would be most appreciated. I personally just bought the 3700 so I am thinking about returning it due to some of the rumors flying around. Thank you!

So I asked my contact at NETGEAR about this. Here's the response:

Yes wndr37AV is the same product positioned for the Home theater connection highlighting the DLNA server and QOS mode. You will see this positioned in the home theater section. Moving forward it will have more streaming related functionality.

So, relax folks. This appears to be just good ol' marketing at work.

I also took the opportunity to ask about the WNDR3400 N600 Wireless Dual Band Router, which I found while checking the FCC ID database for the WNDR37AV.

This is not a four-stream N router. Just a dual-band, two radio, dual-stream router with 10/100 ports that replaces the WNDR3300. The 600 comes from adding the maximum 300 Mbps link rate for each radio.