Value -
Value is another very subjective topic. What is expensive to some might be a deal to others. You can look at this topic in multiple ways. One is raw price and the other is what you get for the money. Each is accurate and both are correct ways to look at price/value. We tend to look at features, performance and real-property when we discuss value. However, we also take into account the raw cash cost of the item. When you talk about the price of products in this class the numbers can get pretty high, but you have to remember the value proposition that they bring to a business. The WC7600 will set your business back to the tune of $3080 for the bas controller with no licenses installed. You can get a 10-pack of licenses for about $1060. This is not a bad price when you consider what you are able to get back out of the WC7600. You get central configuration capabilities with a 10Gbe connection, stacking, load balancing, 802.11ac support and more.

For the WN370, each AP will run you $219 which is about $100 cheaper than comparable products on the market. The biggest difference is that some of the competition will allow the ports to be configured with individual VLans for greater segmentation of devices.

Conclusion -
To wrap things up we really felt that the WC7600 was a great product for a medium sized business with wireless needs. It has a good price point and a feature set that is not really present in the same price range. The options of 802.11ac and 10Gbe connectivity gives you room to grow and ensure that your bandwidth needs are covered for the future. The WebUI is solid although there do need to be a few more options for controlling both the DHCP servers you setup and the SSIDs (being able to add a VLan to both would be great).

For the WN370 we were less impressed although the price does put them into a good spot if you are just getting things off the ground and do not have a large budget. Again NETGEAR needs to add in the ability to put VLans on the individual ports on the WN370. Doing this will give is much more flexibility and make it more attractive to hospitality businesses where there is a real need for port segmentation and ACL (Access Control Lists) per Vlan to prevent guests from using the networks they are not supposed to be on (like phone and IPTV).

NETGEAR’s push into this market is a solid one and we can only see them improving from here as they learn and add more products.

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