Netgear ships premium WNDR3800 dual-band router

Netgear announced today the availability of its top-of-the-line true dual-band router, the N600 Wireless Dual Band Gigabit Router Premium Edition (model WNDR3800).

Introduced at CES 2011, the WNDR3800 is an upgrade to the company's existing WNDR3700. Netgear says it's the first home router to offer the Clear Channel Selector feature and also the first that's capable of creating private cloud file sharing through Netgear's new ReadyShare Cloud service.

Clear Channel Selector, which the company says is generally available only in expensive wireless routers for businesses, "automatically detects when the Wi-Fi channel currently in use becomes overcrowded and switches to another, less crowded channel." This helps maintain good throughput speeds between the router and connected clients.

Netgear says the WNDR3800 is equipped with a powerful 680MHz processor, 16MB of flash storage, and 120MB of RAM so it can deliver fast network storage when coupled with an external hard drive via its USB port.

On top of that, the router offers other premium features such as the easy-to-use Netgear Genie software, Web-based Parental Control, DLNA streaming, and an Automatic Quality of Service feature. However, it seems that as a dual-band router the new WNDR3800 doesn't offer the new 450Mbps speed on either of its bands, a new feature found in other high-end routers such as the Cisco Linksys E4200 and even the Netgear N750 WNDR4000. Instead, the WNDR3800 is a standard true dual-band N router that offers 300Mbps Wi-Fi throughput speed on both bands.

The new Netgear N600 Wireless Dual Band Gigabit Router Premium Edition (WNDR3800) router is now available at an estimated price of $180. If you want to use the ReadyShare Cloud service with your mobile device, there's also an app for both iOS and Android that costs another $3.