Reining in the Router Rabble--Six 802.11n Routers Reviewed

Posted 01/20/2010 at 1:00pm | by Michael Brown

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The market is crammed with mainstream 802.11 routers—we'll help you find the best one

In our last router roundup, way back in November 2007, we wrote, “We’re months away from a final IEEE 802.11n standard.” We never imagined that months would stretch into nearly two years before that standards body would finally finish ironing out all the details. But now that the spec has been ratified, 802.11n routers abound—and their prices have dropped dramatically.

Back then, the average price of the 802.11n Draft 2.0 routers that we reviewed—all of which had single-band radios—was $130. The average street price of the six single-band 802.11n routers in this batch has dropped to less than half that. The even better news is that the cheapest router in this roundup also delivered the best real-world performance.

You’ll want to consider features as well as benchmark numbers, of course. If you have complex routing requirements, you’ll want a model with tweaker-friendly firmware. And if you rely on VoIP for telephone service, play online games, or stream video over your wireless network while downloading files using BitTorrent, you’ll want a router with robust quality-of-service features. One of the models we tested allows you to share a printer over your network; another boasts advanced parental-control features.

And then there’s the certification issue to consider: Each of the routers in this roundup implements features of the IEEE 802.11n standard, but not all of them carry the Wi-Fi Alliance’s 802.11n certification logo. We’ll go into more detail about this in our buyers guide.
 
Read on for our full review of six of the latest mainstream 802.11n routers on the market.

Buyers Guide

What to look for in a Wi-Fi router

Wi-Fi Alliance Certification

Any router with an “n” in its name is capable of delivering raw data rates of 300- to 450Mb/s, right? Wrong. The Wi-Fi Alliance awards 802.11n interoperability certification only to routers that support two or more spatial streams (each stream is capable of a raw data-transfer rate of 150Mb/s). Single-stream client adapters can be certified as 802.11n, but the Wi-Fi Alliance awards only 802.11a, 802.11b/g, or 802.11a/b/g certification to single-stream routers. Any product that previously qualified for 802.11n Draft 2.0 certification can be automatically certified to be in compliance with the final standard. When in doubt, check which logo appears on the box.

Switch Speed

Nearly every wireless router has an integrated switch for making hardwired Ethernet connections. You need to move upscale to get a gigabit switch, though; each of the devices in this roundup has WAN and LAN ports that are limited to 100Mb/s speeds. A narrow WAN port isn’t a big deal (even screaming-fast FiOS connections top out at 50Mb/s downstream), and you probably won’t miss a gigabit switch unless you’re running a NAS box or a server.

Quality of Service

Quality of service (QoS) refers to the router’s ability to assign different priorities to the various types of traffic moving over the network. Wi-Fi Multimedia (WMM) is a QoS baseline because the router must have it in order to be certified by the Wi-Fi Alliance. WMM is designed to prioritize network traffic passing through the router according to four criteria (provided the appropriate bits are embedded in the packets before they’re put on the network). Voice traffic receives the highest priority, followed closely by video traffic. Packets carrying a “best effort” flag come next, followed by packets identified as “background.”

Better routers include more robust QoS features. They might let you prioritize traffic by application (so that packets related to an online game are favored over BitTorrent downloads or web-browsing activity, for instance), or by IP or MAC address or Ethernet port (so that a specific device gets higher priority than anything else on the network).

Storage Option

An increasing number of routers support USB storage devices. Some models support true NAS (network-attached storage) functionality, so that computers on the network can access the drive just like any other storage device. Others provide access to the storage only through a built-in FTP server.

Printer Option

Some routers can function as a printer server, allowing you to share a single USB printer with every PC on your network. Support for multifunction printers is elusive, however; you can typically share the printer function over the network, but not the scanning or fax features.

Parental Controls

We’re not big fans of this feature (we believe it affords a false sense of security because kids will figure out how to circumvent it anyway), but parental controls do at least allow you to put temporary roadblocks in front of unsavory websites, and they make activities such as peer-to-peer file sharing more difficult to pull off.

Our Testing Methodology

We tested the routers in this story at Maximum PC Lab North, a 2,800 square-foot single-family home in a rural area of Northern California. Each router was paired with the vendor’s matching USB wireless client adapter plugged into a laptop client. The router was placed on a shelf in one of the bedrooms, and we used the freeware benchmark utility IPerf (with the Jperf Java front end) to measure TCP throughput between two end points, with the client end point placed at three locations inside the house and three outside it.

Trendnet's TEW-639GR single-band 802.11n router, reviewed in our Holiday 2009 issue, delivered the best throughput in four of our six test locations, so we used it as our basis for comparison.

We configured each router to operate in 802.11n-only mode (if that option was available). We used WPA2 security with AES encryption and enabled channel bonding. The home is located on a 10-acre parcel and is well isolated from any neighboring wireless networks that might be operating nearby. We retested Trendnet’s TEW-639GR single-band 802.11n router, which scored a solid 8 verdict in our review in the Holiday 2009 issue, and used it as our zero point. You’ll find a raft of additional details about our testing methodology and environment here.