Setup and Monitoring

If you purchase the NETGEAR Nighthawk MR2100 mobile router, chances are the internal battery will not be charged out of the box, and powering on the device by pressing the power button will prompt you to charge it first before setting up the mobile router. Use the time to install the nano SIM card and then just wait for the battery to get charged sufficiently. Once done, the router should automatically detect and connect to the LTE network of your choice, and the display will show as much. The display itself is a weak point, however, with the user experience akin to a smartphone from over a decade ago because of the low resolution and, more importantly, poor touch screen response. An indicator LED here does help, but as you will see in the videos below, it can get frustrating.

You can set up most of the router even without a nano SIM card, which includes going through the WiFi standby settings for battery life that range from 5 min to never if you have it charged all the time. Indeed, as with any WiFi router, it will generate a WiFi network (or two given the usual Wireless N and AC networks it sends out), and these can be customized further with the capacitive buttons in addition to the display that has well laid out buttons. The actual design and layout of the integrated controls is intuitive, which makes that the touch screen does not back this up because of its poor latency and general physical usage a big shame. Indeed, there are times when the capacitive buttons don't work when you expect them to, so you need to be extremely deliberate and even try multiple times to get to where you want to in the menu.

Going back to what I was saying previously, the software menu and control options are actually much more impressive than what you might have expected from an integrated display. You have pretty much all you can think of, and there are some other options externally as laid out in the user manual which allow for more features, including selecting the USB Type C connection to be charging only even when connected to a PC and customizing QoS (Quality of Service) settings for connected devices (up to 20 of them!). There is little reason to miss out on the more typical web browser firmware, which is still possible here, and the display and integrated controls work best for a portable device such as this one.

NETGEAR, true to its history, maintains multiple methods of setup and monitoring, including the mobile apps aptly called NETGEAR Mobile available for both iOS and Android devices. One of these days, NETGEAR will hopefully realize just how many business units with individual apps they have to then consolidate most of them. Unfortunately, given the 1-month valid nano SIM card sent along and my needing to switch this unit out for another one due to a logistics error, I had no time left on the nano SIM card to test the app properly since I had to prioritize performance testing. As such, I can only imagine it being similar to the rest of NETGEAR's mobile apps, which all seem to share very common DNA regardless.