Netgear Trek n300 Travel Router and Range Extender Review #travel Gadget

For those of you who travel, for business or pleasure, like I do, and for those of you who actually need a bit of a boost for your wifi range at home, also like I do, the Netgear Trek is a great idea. I was sent a Netgear Trek to test out here for a few weeks and I have been working hard on getting used to the gadget. I had high hopes for this, maybe too high.

The Netgear Trek is a travel router and range extender. It doesn’t come with cables or any extra parts. The Netgear Trek has a built in antenna you can easily flip up to increase performance. I have been struggling with my Internet connectivity lately. I was exploring where this works best in my home to increase range. It doesn’t seem to be helpful inside the office at all. I assumed that was because it was too close to my existing router. But upstairs in my daughter’s room it worked a bit better. Please note I have given this gadget multiple tries in multiple areas of my home.

The N300 Travel Router Trek Model PR2000 is very small as noted and it comes with built in USB port and one micro USB port as well. When the Wifi antenna is open you can easily see the four LED lights beneath. (Power, Internet, Wifi and Wired) There is also a reset button and two Ethernet ports. I tried connecting directly to the Ethernet ports as well but that didn’t work from the Mac in my office. You can use this as a firewall in public if you are connected at a coffee shop in public for instance where the security is low. That would be a useful application of this gadget.

Netgear Genie Interface makes setting up Netgear products fairly simple. Netgear Genie is also available as an app for iOS and Android users. I think the Genie interface is great and I love the parental controls. But this gadget fell short on functionality for me. The Trek took too long to get activated when it was in my home being used as a range extender. Time is money when you run a business and that was a problem for me.

I attempted to use the Netgear Trek in my office in both a wired through Ethernet and wireless capacity with WIFI and had no luck. In fact the entire experience was frustrating. I recognize that this is a relatively small, compact and fairly affordable device but I expected more from it. 

The Pros: It doesn’t come with any extra bits. It is affordable and compact. Netgear Genie Interface is great.

The Cons: This should work and connect almost effortlessly to make me want to use it. It didn’t ever work well enough as a bridge within my home or a range extender. I had high hopes for this but they weren’t met unfortunately.

I was provided with a Netgear Trek for purposes of this review. My opinion is my own.