NETGEAR Nighthawk WiFi Extender EX3700, up to 1,000 sq ft, 750 Mbps

In the past couple of months, I have been experiencing issues concerning my connection when I was inside my bedroom. This has lead to laggy video calls and poor viewing of my videos at night. As a result, I had to move into my office whenever I wanted to do any of these, however, I sometimes like to call my girlfriend at night while we sleep. I saw this product and bought it while it was on sale, and it came the next day. This product is perfect since it was an easy setup, extends the range of my signal, and is unnoticeable at first glance. The setup for this product was very easy. At first, it felt like a headache since I was confused why the device was not pairing to my wifi router. I read the instructions and realized that I was doing it wrong. ****As a tip, make sure to wait an extra minute after pressing the pair buttons, as once the lights stop flickering, the device is beginning the pairing process. I assumed that it was not pairing and gave up on trying to pair, but I found out that the device had indeed paired, I just was inpatient. Overall, if you follow instructions it is very simple to pair. The main purpose of this extender is to extend the range into my bedroom. And it does its job perfectly. When positioning the device, place halfway between the router and the intended room/area of coverage. I placed it in my office where it has a very strong signal. The product fits right into a socket, and as soon as you pair it to your phone, you are all done. The signal is very strong, a bit weaker than the regular signal in my office, but it is perfect for everything that I do. I am extremely satisfied. The main reason I love this device is that I can place it where nobody can see it. I have placed the device behind a couch, and because the device is slim, it fits perfectly. It does not stick out like a sore thumb, and it's super easy for me to access it in case I want to change the position. In conclusion, if there is a signal in your house that needs a signal boost, get this product. I am very satisfied with how well it covers my room. Please note that this product is not a stronger signal than without connected near the router, rather it allows the range to be extended. Do not use this product if you want it for gaming, streaming, or downloading content, as it will be slower than the normal router. Its main purpose is to extend to dead zones in a house or large body of space. This product is perfect, and I highly recommend it for anybody who wants to boost signal in a slow part of a house.

Received this WiFi repeater booster today. I bought it from Amazon Warehouse. It is great condition. Set up was so easy. I used the WPS method and it took me maybe 5-10 minutes. I set up both the 2.4 and 5 ghz channels. To connect the 5 Ghz channel just repeat the process of pushing the WPS button on the repeater and then the router...then just wait a minute or two for it to connect to the router. I plugged it in on the second floor pretty far from my router and it is performing really well. I have a 2.4 and 5 connection which I can select. In one area, where I was getting next to no signal, I am getting good signal. The speed is also faster slightly on the repeater channels. I have to say I am very satisfied so far. I have another generic repeater I got on ebay....I am sure you have seen them. Well, that one did not work well at all which is why I bought this one. I looked at the 300 version but figured for a few extra bucks the dual channel and potentially faster speed was better. One more thing....I connected my Fire Stick to the repeater channel 5 ghz and my FIre Stick is responding faster now! This is an extra bonus. In fact, the signal from the repeater is strong on the first level as well. This repeater was easy to setup and solved my problem. I recommend it. Update June 16, 2019 Today my Amazon Fire Stick had trouble connecting to the internet. It eventually worked after turning the stick on and off. Later on I went to look at the device and LED showing router connection was off. I had to unplug and replug this in. Not sure if I will return it. Maybe I will have to plug it in when I need it. When it works it works well. June 28. I could see the two WiFi signals but neither one would let me connect. I had to unplug and replug it in and then the connections worked. Seems a little spotty though. I dropped this one star because of the inconsistency. July 18 2019 Overall happy with this. Seems to be more consistently accessible. Much better signal than the main signal from my router.

So overall, I give this Netgear AC750 WiFi Range Extender 5 stars for doing a solid job extending my home wifi to my farthest room, maintaining solid speed and providing a full 3 bars of wireless connectivity, all at a low price. Here's some feedback on a few key areas: Size/quality -- very small, plugs into the bottom plug in a 2-plug, standard outlet and leaves room to plug in another item above it (no problem). Material quality seems to be quite good, nice materials, clear lettering/labeling, buttons have a good tactile feel to them. Don't forget to peel off the thin, transparent film over the front panel. Setup -- a bit "glitchy"... 2 options for setup, WPS mode (the "easier" one) and with Web Browser setup. I tried WPS mode and despite following directions, the unit would not establish a connection with the router. SO, as directions state, I tried the "Connect with Web Browser" mode. This seemed to go ok, but in a couple spots, it seemed to glitch a bit when following directions, but after some "extra" time (15 min?), I skipped one of the steps and it was able to complete the setup. I was able to connect to both the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands (as my Verizon FIOS router supported it). This is good especially regarding speed (below). Speed/performance -- so overall very pleased with this area... there's an upstairs room in my house that's farthest from the router, and wireless can vary there from very occasionally a full 3-bars, to occasionally 2-bars, to typically 1-or-2 bars, to sometimes 1-bar, to occasionally 0 bars ("your iPad is not connected to the internet" -- ugh). Here are the results I saw (based on speedtest.net average of 3 tests per setup): Original/optimum wireless (iPad 3-ft from router) -- Ping = 9ms; Download = 25 Mbps; Upload = 29 Mbps Original wireless in farthest location in house -- Ping = 10ms; Download = 8 Mbps; Upload = 9 Mbps AC750 Extender 2.4GHz band in farthest location -- Ping = 10ms; Download = 21 Mbps; Upload = 19 Mbps (full 3 bars wireless strength) AC750 Extender 5GHz band in farthest location -- Ping = 12ms; Download = 33 Mbps; Upload = 20 Mbps (full 3 bars wireless strength) So you can see that the AC750 Extender significantly improved Download speeds (vs. original wireless), nearly 4x for the 5GHz band, and doubled the upload speed (all compared to performance in the same physical location at the farthest spot from the router). Just as important, the wireless strength was a full 3 bars with the extender, whereas my original wireless is quite weak there and occasionally drops completely ("Your iPad is not connected to the internet"... hate that!). I would definitely recommend this product and purchase again, especially considering the performance for the inexpensive price.

Most Recent Update: While searching to find a better WiFi extender I discovered the reviews and documentation on many other moderately priced extenders either didn't mention MAC address filtering, had many user complaints that this feature didn't work, or alluded to similar "virtual MAC addresses." I experimented a little more with this repeater and discovered their new "virtual addresses" were really the actual hardware addresses of the connected device (an address which I had already entered into the Router table) but with the first three hexidecimal pairs replaced with "o2:0f:b5." Thus, a device with a real MAC address of "1a:2b:3c:4d:5e:6f" would be forwarded to the router as "o2:of:b5:4d:5e:6f:" Why do they do this? The real address is already in the router table. They're forcing me to add a second address for every device that might connect to the repeater with this "pig Latin" version of a MAC address. But, at least I now know how to configure the table, and making altered duplicates of the existing entries was easier than their suggested method of turning off MAC filtering, running around the house to every device which might work better using the repeater and connecting it to the repeater, trying to discover new MAC addresses on a dynamically updating "connected device" list, writing down these new MAC addresses, turning MAC filtering back on to expose the MAC address tables, and typing the newly discovered virtual addresses into the table. I still don't understand why they screw around with the MAC addresses instead of just using the real address, or why they don't document how their "virtual MAC addresses" are formed, but now that I know their secret I got it to work so I'm keeping the repeater. -------------------------------------------------- New Problems: Turns out the mysterious "Android" address I had to add to get the extender to work only fixed the problem for my phone. In addition to the five MAC addresses for the extender, every device that connects to the extender generates a new "virtual MAC address" that has to be added to the router table. For mobile devices, which might sometimes connect to the main router and sometimes connect to the extender, this means entering two MAC addresses in the router table - the actual hardware address which I already have and a new "virtual" address which I can only discover by turning off MAC filtering and looking for a new, undocumented device. I'm sending this repeater back and getting one from a competitor. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I rated this a "3" overall because once I finally got it configured it seems to work pretty well, and if you don't want to limit access based upon MAC addresses it's pretty easy to set up. Configuring it for MAC filtering, however, was a nightmare. That feature is mostly undocumented, what documentation does exist is misleading, and although their Tech Support was friendly and tried to be helpful, they didn't know much about MAC filtering. I'm not an IT expert, but I've configured several home WiFi routers and repeaters in the past with no problem. MAC filtering was a pain because I had to find the MAC address of every device I wanted to connect and type that address into a table in the router and also type these addresses into a table in the repeater, but it worked. It took me maybe 10 minutes to get this range extender working without MAC filtering. I spent probably 6 or 7 hours getting it to work with MAC filtering, including probably 4 hours working with Netgear's Tech Support staff. My first challenge was finding the MAC address of the extender. There was no documentation on how to find this address. The documentation simply said "connect everything you have to the extender and then copy all the MAC address that show up on your router into the MAC table. No can do. Not all the devices I have are within range of the extender - most connect directly to the router - and several devices that I need to connect to the extender belong to children who weren't home at the moment. Also, some weird devices (neighbors?) show up in the connection table whenever I turn off MAC filtering, so I don't want to add any "unknown" devices to the MAC authorization and give them unlimited access to my network. So, I connected some devices and looked at the list of connected devices, which changed dynamically as lightly tasked devices periodically touched base. Nothing that looked remotely like a Netgear repeater showed up. On most devices you need to dig down into a "Settings" menu to find the MAC address. No such luck with this extender. I also couldn't find any reference to it in the documentation or in the installation wizard, so I contacted Tech Support. They said it was printed on the label on the back of the device. I had looked at the label and successfully found a number which I correctly guessed to be the serial number (needed to contact Tech Support) by using a bright light and reading glasses. There were other numbers, unlabeled, which I assumed were specific model numbers, lot numbers, etc. By using a bright light, reading glasses, and a powerful magnifying glass I now saw that one had the word "MAC" written in even tinier letters, placed vertically, beside it. Configuring this device is not for the visually challenged, or for anyone with less than perfect eyesight. I hadn't recognized this as the MAC address because, contrary to common practice and to what the Netgear start-up guide said, it wasn't configured like a MAC address. I would have instantly recognized "F7:42:3B: . . ." as a hexidecimal MAC address. The label presented it as "F7423B. . ." which looks remarkably like a serial number or lot number. The Tech Support person also said I'd have to reset to factory defaults after I entered the MAC address into my router. I entered the hardware MAC address, reset to factory defaults, and reconfigured the repeater from scratch. Several times. Still no luck. Then, in what looked like a footnote to one of the error messages I received, I noticed wording that said "Make certain you enter these MAC addresses in your router." They provided four MAC addresses which were formatted as MAC addresses, but strung together so it was tough to see where one ended and the other began. During one of the many periods I spent searching online for tips on configuring this extender I had read that Netgear used something called "virtual MAC addresses" instead of a hardware address, so I replaced the hardware address with these four. Still no luck. The next call to Tech Support took several hours. She had me reset to factory default several times, enter the hardware MAC address in addition to the four virtual MAC addresses, and change several settings on my router. Still no luck. The extender would connect to the router and devices would connect to the extender, but the extender refused to provide them with IP addresses. The Tech Support person finally declared that it must be a router problem and said I needed to call the router manufacturer's Tech Support. More searching on the Internet. Now that I had the problem narrowed down to "Netgear extender connects to devices but won't provide IP addresses" I found an entry in the Netgear knowledge base (why couldn't Tech Support find that?) which said "Turn off MAC filtering and look at the connect table for any devices with MAC addresses that begin with these three character pairs." I did that, and after watching the table go through a few refresh cycles I spotted something labeled "Android" with the correct MAC prefix. I added that to my MAC table (the 6'th MAC address for a single repeater) and everything started working. So in the end, my repeater works, but I feel I'm being generous in giving a "3" rating to a product that does not provide you with the required MAC addresses in its documentation, its installation software, or through its Tech Support representatives.

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.

15 years ago, I wired my house with CAT-5. Except for my home office, I haven't had much use for it since everything is wireless...at least until I started using more wireless devices in my living room and I realized how bad our reception was at that end of the house. (My router is from Netgear and is 15 years old (300/300) and I am renting my modem/router from Xfinity.) Downloading had been slow and intermittent. Coverage was so bad that I had even gone over my GB's with my wireless service a few months because there were times I didn't realize I wasn't getting enough coverage from my router. I downloaded an app by IP Tools to tell me what kind of wireless bandwidth we were getting around our house. In our living room, the app showed that we were getting about 30 Mbps (or less) out the 300 Mbps my router offers. Forward to a few weeks ago. I went online and found this extender. I bought it not realizing that it had an ethernet input - I thought the port was for output only. (Doing an online search of the subject, everyone who asked about extenders with ethernet inputs were told there were none available - instead, they were told to buy a second router.) When I opened the box and looked at the instructions, I read that the ethernet port was for both input and output. I plugged in the extender, followed the instructions and tested the output. I was amazed. The app on my phone read that I am consistently getting 866 Mbps in my living room. WOW!!! I have no idea why I am getting so much bandwidth - but I'll take it. The product: Super easy to install and it is lighting fast. The product's owner: Super excited. UPDATE 6/21: I have now had this product for over 2 years (Purchased 2/19). The extender still works amazingly fast. From time to time (once to twice a year), it stops working. But all I need to do is unplug it for 10 secs, plug it back in, then in about a minute, it is ready to go. I am very happy with this product. I am a fan of Netgear. My house router is about 17 years old and is still working strong. I had hard wired my house and the Netgear router feeds the house through the CAT5 and with wifi. I have never had an issue with it. UPDATE 11/5/23: Still working very well. I have had to unplug 3 or 4 times over the past 4 years to reset it. But no problems though. Netgear seems to make great products.

Just installed this a few hours ago and so far so good. I'm hoping this item will hold up, meaning no updates to this review will be a good thing. Amazon delivered the unit literally in hours, which was a nice surprise. I'm a bit tech savvy but knew nothing about extenders/boosters so I did some homework on the net. One thing I neglected to look up is if these devices can be used along with a hot spot. I have been using a table as a hot spot for internet for a couple of months, including phones, computer and two TVs. The reception was ok but a bit slow at times, as might be expected. My main concern was a slow computer and the iffy connection between my computer and TVs using Plex (highly recommended, by the way). I live in a smallish one bedroom apartment in a turn of the century (20th century) building, meaning very tick, heavy concrete walls and metal beams. The Netgear extender has done nicely in reaching my living room and bedroom TVs, plus extending the range and strength for my phones and tablets. I used an Ethernet cable for my desktop computer (again, highly recommended). Now the rub...installation. This they don't tell you in the instructions, I had to figure it out myself. Using a tablet for a hot spot, I have no WEP button to facilitate connection. Following the instructions, if you connect to the extender's WIFI address you loose internet connection and no way to connect to the Netgear site to finish installation. Very frustrating. Working around this problem, after plugging in the extender and getting a green light, I ran an Ethernet cable from the unit to my computer and waited. Seconds later my computer recognized the Ethernet hook up. But of course, still no internet. I was then able to use my original WIFI signal from my hot spot to connect to the internet and reach the Netgear setup page. Following the on screen instructions, the rest was a piece of cake. Result: Green lights everywhere, indicating a strong signal; no buffering on either TV with Netflicks, YouTubeTV, etc; strong phone signals, and my computer flies, via the Ethernet connection, with blindingly fast download speeds. Plus my Plex has all the oomph it needs to wireless feed my two TVs. In hind site I would have opted for a more powerful (and thus expensive) extender/booster, and one with multiple Ethernet ports. Don't know what Netgear doesn't include this in the instructions. But as I said, so far so good.

I ordered this because it is a dual band extender and I have a dual band router (a Google Fiber box, to be specific) and I wanted to boost the signal to some areas of my house where it has a hard time reaching. Setup was okay, but could be better. Not exactly plug and play. I ran into a few difficulties getting the webpage for the extender to load (not to mention the fact that it logs you out within like 5 minutes of no activity - really far too quickly if you are trying to do several things at once). Once I did that it took me several tries to find a spot in my house where the thing would actually pick up a signal from my router. I finally got that settled and managed to get the 2.4 Ghz band working just fine (which is the only reason I'm giving this 2-stars instead of just one). However, I ran into plenty of problems with the 5 ghz band. It simply refused to recognize that it was there at all. On the web page for the router it showed that it was there but wouldn't connect. I can log directly onto the 5 ghz band (on my original router) on my phone so I know it works. The 5 ghz extension appeared on my phone but when I would log on it would say there was no internet connection. On my laptop the 5 ghz extension didn't even show up as an option. I went online and searched forums for Negear and for Google Fiber and found that this is not an uncommon problem with this particular extender. However, after trying all of the suggestions on the forums I still couldn't get it to work - even when the extender was plugged in just a few feet from the router. Having run out of options I contacted Netgear support and after exchanging several e-mails with a person who was - bless him - trying to be helpful but obviously didn't speak English as a first language, he finally told me to return the product. All I want to do is extend the range of the wifi in my house. It shouldn't really be this complicated. I chose this product because of the majority of positive reviews it has. Guess I should have paid more attention to the negative ones.

I love it man.. I had alot issues with wifi signal in bedroom, I just plugged it, and it is working perfectly fine.

Lo compre para casa de mis papas, donde el router estaba en el segundo piso y en el primer piso no llegaba la señal. Este aparato tiene mejor señal que el mismo router, un TP-Link, y trabaja con banda 2.4 y 5 Ghz. Muy facil de configurar y con indicadores sobre si esta recibiendo suficiente señal. Muy satisfecho con la compra.

Met my expectation, good extender.

Después de haber comprado el modelo N300 y resultar peor que la señal débil del router me decidí a probar el modelo AC750. Con este la recepción es excelente. Hay que investigar si la potencia del modelo va a ser suficiente o se necesita uno mas potente Por lo demas el extensor es muy pequeño, fácil de instalar, no reemplaza la señal del router asi que puedes elegir a cual conectarte. Muy buena compra

Working superbly