Amazon.com: Customer reviews: NETGEAR WiFi Range Extender EX3700 - Coverage up to 1000 sq.ft. and 15 devices with AC750 Dual Band Wireless Signal Booster & Repeater (up to 750Mbps speed), and Compact Wall Plug Design

Stopped working in 1st year & no support from Netgear

Reviewed in the United States on June 15, 2017

After about 9 months of light use, the 2.4g channel has stopped working on all devices (5g works fine). I called Netgear technical support and they only offer complimentary support on this product for 90 days, after which they want you to pay for support. I researched this issue online and found several posts with the same problem. I have done a factory reset, firmware update and confirmed the settings are correct. Netgear does offer a 1-year warranty but they require a return authorization number, which can only be obtained through technical support, which requires a paid subscription. This doesn't seem ethical. I would avoid this product and given the warranty/technical support catch 22, I will certainly be considering other manufacturers for future purchases.

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1212 comments

MIKE

This Extender does work pretty well

Reviewed in the United States on July 16, 2017

Verified Purchase

When it arrived and I took it out of the box I thought it was broken because the manual and directions kind of suck because to do the step by step directions don't work right. It took some trial and error to figure it out because I thought I had a bad extender out of the box.

1st thing you want to do is plug it into an outlet right next to your main router and what that does is let's them sync up to each other.

2nd thing you want to do when the extender power button is solid green is push the WPS button on your main router until it's blinking and then push the WPS button on the extender.

3rd thing you should see the lights on the extender light up on the Router, Power, and WPS.

The Device light will stay unlit until you try and log into the extender.

Click your WiFi settings and you will see a new 2.5ghz and a 5ghz and those are your new ones that are broadcast through the extender.

I know this is confusing but you need to enter your password that you use on your Internet provider on the new extender and log into it and try both the 2.5ghz and the 5ghz and save both of them and you should see the Device light on the extender light up to green.

When you have done the complete install with the WPS feature on your main router then you ready to move it to the other side of the house but don't move it to far because you mighy not get a strong signal. Mine is about 20ft from my main router and it covers this old stone wall farmhouse perfect.

The last thing you want to do is hit the WPS button on your router again and hit the WPS button on the extender again and if there within a good distance of each other and all lights are green then you should be up and running but if there not green then you will have to move it closer to your main router.

If your main router doesn't have a WPS option on it then you might have to call netgear online support to help you out because I didn't find another way to install it correctly.

Another thing is if the power ever does go our just sync them back up with the WPS button and wait like 5mins and it will work again because you already did all the setup.

I leave mine on 24/7 and it runs a little warm here and there but that's normal and I have never had any issues except power outages from thunder storms.

Hope this helps someone else but every Internet providers router might be different but I'm using the new Comcast router on the triple play with the works.

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88 comments

josh hockman

This actually SLOWS your traffic!!!!

Reviewed in the United States on August 4, 2018

Verified Purchase

I bought this to increase the wifi signal (which is very weak, resulting in relatively slower DL's) for the second story of my home, because I read things like, "FASTER WIFI SPEEDS - Combined speeds up to 750 Mbps", and, "Mobile Up to 100% Faster Improve your mobile WiFi speeds by up to 100% with AC750 WiFi Range Extender!", - both are direct copy pastes from the Amazon sales page..... Unfortunately, on page 7 of the user manual, you find this gem: "Data traffic routed through the extender is inherently slower than traffic routed directly from the network."

Speed test results (with Gigabit internet service):

Regular WiFi: 279M down; 41M up.
2G extender: 156M down; 42M up.
5G extender: 122M down, 41M up.

The range extender has a much stronger signal, but is close to half the speed!

Total waste of money.

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1111 comments

It's good, but realize it's limitations.. Read on for the good stuff.

Reviewed in the United States on July 21, 2016

Verified Purchase

As a Senior Network Engineer I work around a lot of networking hardware. I am very adept with AP's, Extenders, WLC's, and all of that so I knew what to expect with this. I am not sure why people are complaining about setup, it's ridiculously simple! Note, this is NOT a Mesh-Mode AP/Router, it's an EXTENDER or AP, which means it will provide a 'new' SSID that you can connect to that will bridge to your primary SSID. You should not use this with the same SSID as your router or there could be serious issues. (That's MESH MODE and this is not that!)

For extender mode, what this device does is grab the SSID from your main router and act as a 'bridge' to that router and re-broadcasts the signal with it's own hardware over another SSID. Think of it as a relay race for wireless.. You can use almost anything to bridge networks, even other laptops, routers and access points. So your traffic goes like this: Device over extender SSID to Extender. Extender Hardware processes it as a bridge mode router then sends it through wireless to the existing SSID from your primary router. You are hopping multiple SSID's. To set this up you just put in the SSID and Passkey for your existing wireless, assign a new SSID to the Extender - and note this SHOULD be a different SSID than the primary SSID from your router. Once this is done you connect your wireless devices to the extender and it will 'hop' your data from the extender to the router.

QUICK SETUP: Plug in the extender, wait for it to boot up (2 min), connect your laptop to the SSID of the extender which by default will be something like "NETGEAR_EXT".. Once your device connects to this open up a browser and go to 192.168.1.250, that's the gateway, which is the extender. Once you hit the IP of the extender you will enter setup mode. Here it will ask a series of questions, poll the existing WiFi in the area, and have you setup a new SSID after you input the existing SSID information from your normal router. Setup is done! Now any device you want to go through the extender should utilize the SSID on the extender NOT the SSID on the primary router. Presto! A couple reviewers hammered this for difficult setup which I find hard to believe. Follow my instructions and it's up and running in 3 minutes, and 2 of those minutes are the device booting up! (seriously)

Second mode this can do is AP Mode. Essentially it will act as an AP off your existing network. Connect an ethernet cable to it and set it up per the instructions and you will have a second AP In your home utilizing the same network but different SSIDs! Remember, this is not an enterprise grade WLC AP so you are not going to have multiple AP's using the same AP profile and SSID, each AP will have different SSID's. (but they can use the same password for continuity)

IMPORTANT: A HUGE benefit to this device is it's ability to run in AP mode. Think about this - you are in a motel room with bad wireless but strong ethernet. Simply plug this in and have your own SSID's with speedy wireless. Another important way this can be used is with insecure wireless networks. You can 'hop' this into insecure networks and provide your devices with their own secured SSID's with AES Passkeys. Anyone attempting to hack you through the insecure WiFi would need to hack your secured device and SSID! So there are some pretty cool things you can do with this. Although keep in mind it's not a VPN so they still could sniff the stream going from the extender to the router if the router uses an unsecured SSID, but at least they aren't getting directly into your device so there is some slight, additional security.

Features/Advanced Options: After you run through the silly quickstart stuff you can go to 192.168.1.250 which is likely the preferred DCHP this will grab from your router. From here you have advanced options where you can see transfer rates, connected clients,setup MAC access permissions and other goodies. Not bad! But again this is really a tiny router so these settings are to be expected. There is a 'Fastlane' system in this which is really a gimmick that is absolutely pointless and more generally considered a marketing feature. What this does is you give the extender a designated frequency from your router (2.4 or 5.0) then the router pushes 5.0 with the 2.4 or 2.4 with the 5.0 channel. This is just frequency isolation that will allow you to use a designated band for the extender. It's utterly pointless in my testing and offers no speed boost at all. In a crowded home with a lot of devices this would probably be something you may use. Forcing everyone on 2.4 then piping 5.0 directly to the extender then 2.4 off of the extender. But I would say for 90%+ of uses this is utterly pointless. It's also likely why the feature is buried on the device in sub menus. I'd leave it off.

PERFORMANCE: I will say while the performance of this device is good, it's not perfect. You WILL NOT get the same performance as your primary router. The reason for this is that you are stepping through what amounts to an additional (low powered) router. This device has session and throughput limitations that are likely well below your router in some cases. Performance is lost in that transition, but also the SSID hopping also degrades the speed. This is to be expected, this is not an access point, it's an extender and performance on an extender will never be as good as a pure router or AP.

In my case, my connection averages 110Mbps-180Mbps over my primary router and AP's. (2400AC) Through the extender I averaged 50-60Mbps per device. That's a 50% loss on average of speed in comparison to the primary router/AP configuration. So remember, the point of this is to get WiFi to areas of your home with bad WiFi coverage but don't expect this to be a speed demon. Also there is a slight ping-drop between this and the router, expect 20-50% increase in ping latency. So if your existing router averages 10-20ms to a close hop, this will bump that to 20-40ms average. Not a big deal unless you are a gamer, that could present some issues.

Do I like this device? Absolutely! It's the best extender I have ever seen to date. Is the technology of extenders perfect? No. But this is as good as you are going to get unless you want to run a router in MESH or install a WLC and controlled AP's. I am using this for my vacation where signal power is probably going to suffer, but in my home my AP's do the heavy lifting and this isn't needed. Also on vacation I will provide myself with my own secure SSID's to use and leave the other SSID's for anyone else at the vacation home.. ISOLATION!

IMPROVEMENTS: Companies that make these extenders should focus on reducing latency and increasing throughput. This would be done by putting better processors in these units. My APs in the home have quad core processors and can handle a lot of speed, sessions and clients. I would guess this unit has a sub-1Ghz single core processor which is going to limit your performance. I suspect the higher model number has a better processor and/or other brands have better processors which would likely result in more robust performance.

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5150+ comments

The Crazy Autist

Hillbilly Wi-fi

Reviewed in the United States on May 21, 2017

Verified Purchase

I set up residence on a family member's property...somewhere out in the yard over there... and needed to extend the wi-fi from his house. This item did the trick and I was quite impressed with my Redneck Skills by fastening a base to the bridge railing and then fastening an old Tupperware bucket over it for shelter. It's been that way for seven months now and has never failed once.

My structure is about 100-120 feet from the main house and this extender is in the middle of that. At times I can "barely" get a peace of the house wi-fi but most often I get the extender. I get four bars from it in this position. On occasion it goes down to three bars. I never suffer speed cutbacks compared to the main house.

Set up was very easy using the instructions. I was set up in an hour.

I have plans to build a more permanent light post with mason jar lights and a bird house on top with a roof made from Budweiser cans. I'll also add a wind measure device made from an old bicycle wheel. I'll make a "wi-fi" icon painted on barn wood and hang that somewhere on the poll, making very sure that it's absolutely crooked. It will be a glorious art piece in time and be a testament to human ingenuity.

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77 comments

DEdwards

Nightmare to set up and impossible to decipher instruction manual

Reviewed in the United States on March 28, 2018

Verified Purchase

No stars. Returned it. Massive PIA to try to decipher the tech argot of the directions and it didn't work anyway. I bought it to extend the range of my router's wifi signal for an outdoor camera. Even after all the irritation involved with getting it paired to the house wifi and then plugging the extender into an outlet closer to the camera, it had zero impact on the camera's signal. The location receives a strong 4-bar signal from the router, too. There's no phone number to call for help with the setup unless you register the product first. The website you have to go to for the setup process doesn't even bother to tell you up front, where it might be helpful, that you won't ever see the setup assistant until you access Netgear's web pages through the extender's wifi, not your home router's wifi. The website has links for setting up with a PC or Mac, but the one for Macs doesn't work--the page never loads. Well, not until you've accidentally come across that information, on a completely different page that you found while looking for set-up help, that you have to access NetGear's pages through the extender's wifi signal, not the wifi from your own router.

If you finally get to the setup assistant you will be asked questions you have no clue how to answer because they're all in tech-speak. Why is it necessary to call a password a "network key"? Why don't you just say "password"? "Make sure your computer is set up to use DHCP". Really. I'll get right on that. I've been using personal computers for 30 years and have never seen the term "DHCP" and have no idea how to check that my computer is set up to use it, but since you bring it up, why don't you tell me how to "make sure" of that? Worthless. The whole instruction guide is like that and the setup assistant is worse by far. And hey, did you know that "WPS does not support WEP network security"? Who cares, if you don't know what either of those things are and if they don't tell you how to determine which your wifi has? The manual will tell you things like, "Click the Next button and the status screen displays". Wrong. Like a lot of the other steps. You know what happens when you click Next? The setup assistant completely vanishes and you end up back on NetGear's main web page. You are not offered something logical for the next step in the process, like a log-in setup option, or a flashing neon sign that says "setup complete" or any information on the status of the device you think you maybe might have possibly just set up. Nothing. Here's our web page. Enjoy this total lack of feedback about what you were just trying to accomplish and whether it worked or not.

No idea whether their phone tech support is any good or not because I put the device back in the box and printed a return label, but phone support is good for only 90 days anyway. Besides, you have to register the product first--so they can have your personal information and probably put you on 20,000 mailing lists for spam--before they'll give you access to the super-duper-secret-classified help line number. Never trust a company that won't give you free phone setup help in its instruction manual.

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88 comments

T. Sanders

What the Network guy chose. Worked great.

Reviewed in the United States on June 21, 2017

Verified Purchase

My main reason for getting this was due to a weak signal for my Ring door bell. I also had very weak signal in one of our bedrooms, but I had procrastinated on that one for years. I have an Apple 802.11ac router located in my office in the far corner of my house and it can't easily be relocated, so after reading reviews I decided to give this a try. I should note that I am a Cisco certified Network Engineer for 20+ years, so I considered a lot of different options, many of which would have driven my wife crazy.

You definitely need to let the wizard create the new SSIDs as you will run into issues trying to reuse the same one as your main router. I joined it to my wireless network and it created two additional SSIDs (myname_2GEXT, and myname_5GEXT). I joined the Ring to the new SSID and took each of our mobile devices into the 'dead zone' bedroom and joined them to the new SSIDs as well. The signal strength is now excellent throughout all of these areas. We just have to make sure we've joined the new SSID when in that one bedroom. That's not a deal breaker for me. For geeks like me, RSSI dropped from -74 to -57 at my furthest corner.

The price of extending the network is losing a bit more than half the speed, but I knew this coming into the project. If you manage those expectations, you will be happy also. I normally get 45-50 Mbps downloads on my main SSID. Using this extender, it drops to 15-18 Mbps. That's still plenty for streaming multiple Netflix programs at the same time. It has the added benefit of essentially rate-limiting anything that I put on the new SSIDs, meaning that any devices that use the extended network cannot use all of my available bandwidth. Unbeknownst to my kids, their games and downloads will never again ruin a conference call.

I should touch on placement. You need to put this closer to your main router than to the area you're trying to cover. In my case it's only about 20' away from my router in the hallway. Wireless signal strength is greatly affected by wood and even more so by glass and metal. I suggest placing this no more than 1 closed door or 1 interior wall away from your router if possible. When planning where to put it, pick the location that is most free from interference. Most of my plugs are behind or under furniture, so that's why the hallway was chosen.

I would buy this again.

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11 comment

Sandy S.

Cant deliver high bandwidth

Reviewed in the United States on September 30, 2017

Verified Purchase

Bought after seeing the thousands of good reviews. I get 100Mbps download/5Mbps upload from my internet provider, as proven using speed tests right next to the modem/router. I wanted an extender that I could conveniently place to catch the signal about 30ft from the modem/router and extend it 30-40 ft to the rooms upstairs. I verified that I was getting an 80-90Mbps signal from the modem/router right next to where I placed the extender. However, I found that upstairs, even after using the extender, I could never get a signal more than 15-20Mbps, with or without the extender. Eventually, I simply put the extender right next to the router, and finally found that even then(!!) I couldnt get more than 15-20Mbps, but without the extender I was getting an easy 80-90Mbps. This thing is just not built for high bandwidth, IMHO. If your requirement is similar, hopefully this review is useful to you. I'm probably going to end up with mesh wifi even though its more expensive.

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22 comments

Mark Kenyon

75% of the time, it works all the time

Reviewed in the United States on October 29, 2018

Verified Purchase

I'm pretty good with electronics and computers, I'm a programmer. I've owned and used this for 5 months now. I have used this extender off of a Netgear R6250 router, and the initial setup using WPS works fine. It finds my network, sets up new SSIDs for the 2.4 and 5 Ghz bands, and works fine. For a couple months.
Then suddenly it stops working. The lights say it's on, you can see the SSID listed, but if you connect to it (I've tested with phones, tablets, and laptops) it will say, 'No Internet Connection', even though the Router LED is green.
I've had to factory reset it to get it back up and running.
The firmware is up to date. My router settings don't change, I don't move it, it just stops working. I don't have time to fuss with it over and over again. I have some smart home devices that don't automatically switch to the other SSIDs in the house, since this still reads as available, so they stop working. It's too much hassle to keep it running, so I'm pulling it out of use at my house.

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22 comments

Amazon Customer

Small, quick, effective and dead simple to install - no issues at all

Reviewed in the United States on December 5, 2017

Verified Purchase

Chose this after a bit of study; braced myself for the install. Have 2.4 and 5G optic fiber bands which laughed audibly at my old repeaters. Need signal on three floors of old house (please pardon the trouble, giant telecom company. Router needs to be n close proximity to biggest, most fabulous TV downstairs that we stream from. And in line with home office. Thank you!)
Anyway: Followed the repeater instructions (while keeping in mind the tips from the IT guy who posted a review here). Plugged this little baby in in near the router, waited nervously for it to connect - ah! - and then pressed the WPA button on this then my router. They chatted for a bit. Then: Bing! Connected. Repeated procedure. Little longer wait, then: Bing! 5G connected (apparently). Shut the repeater off, took it up two floors, and plugged it in near my office computer. Minute later, green lights, yass. Now my computer found four networks; two were extensions from this device. Just type in your router password and click - connected. No issues whatsoever. Of course, I speed-tested each one, because as you probably know, the number of bars is no reflection of the speed when you use a repeater. For me, the extended 5G connection was the winner - is blazing fast. And the install was *dead simple* - I think it took five minutes. Very happy and delighted! Highly recommend. (Will update if there is a need.)

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5 star		54%
4 star		13%
3 star		9%
2 star		7%
1 star		17%

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