Not so long ago, we viewed the 10-foot location 1 test as more theoretical than practical. After all, why would anyone run a wireless device 10 feet from a wired router? Well, with sustained 11n speeds now outstripping 10/100 Ethernet and an explosion in the number and type of Wi-Fi-enabled devices throughout our lives, the practicality and importance of near-range scores only seems to be increasing. So whereas we used to dismiss location 1 results, we now consider all three result sets to be equally important. Wireless devices get used everywhere in the home.
We’ll warn you now: get ready to see a lot of the Linksys router in our discussion here. The ideal thing we want to see are three closely grouped bars at high throughput levels. The norm is to see best results at close range and a steep fall-off as distance and obstacles increase. Check out the D-Link “from router” results for a perfect example of this. Obviously, we want great results at every location. In our 2.4 GHz file transfer tests, both to and from the router, Linksys emerges as the force to beat, never dropping under a 50 Mb/s average in either direction.


ZyXEL and Asus’ N16 put in very respectable showings, both managing to sustain well, save for the N16's drop at location 2. The perplexing thing is how an under-performer like the Belkin N150 takes a big performance leap at location 2 in the “to router” test while disappointing in locations 1 and 3. Go figure.


On the 5 GHz side, Linksys and Ruckus seize the first and second spots. Apparently, the “from router” tests were tougher on three of these four units, Ruckus being the constant exception that makes pretty much every test look easy.
- Router Reignition
- Asus RT-N13U And RT-N16
- Belkin N150 And N1 Vision
- D-Link DIR-685
- Linksys WRT610N
- Netgear WRN2000v2 And WNDR3700
- Ruckus Wireless 7811
- TP-Link WR741ND
- TRENDnet TEW-654TR And TEW-671BR
- ZyXEL X550N
- How We Tested
- Benchmark Results: 1GB Transfer, Many Files
- Benchmark Results: 1GB Transfer, Single File
- Benchmark Results: IxChariot Throughput
- Benchmark Results: IxChariot Response Time
- Benchmark Results: Zap TCP
- Benchmark Results: Zap UDP
- Benchmark Results: PerformanceTest TCP
- Benchmark Results: PerformanceTest UDP
- Conclusion
Good point.
Which firmware was installed on it?
I have one (V1), but am very unhappy about the signal range! I have it replaced with a WNDR3700 and have now a twice as strong signal as before!
Bit the bullet with the $$ and opted for the Linksys and am very pleased.
pato, my WRT600N was the v1 variant. I forget the release version of the firmware, but it was the latest version, as Linksys has not released any updates for it in roughly a year (I've had the router since a few months after it was first released). I liked it due to the dual radios, however, but it would drop wireless clients randomly (which was aggravating and required me to reset the router about once every other month) and it would not retain my port forwarding settings for my home server. And I agree with you, signal range was marginal with that router.
2) Should have tested N + G concurrency on 2.4GHz as well as N only on 2.4 + 5GHz concurrency (for devices that had dual radio). This data is important for most people who will run a Wireless N device or two, but likely also have a few smart phones or a game console that only supports 2.4GHz... I know the Airport Extreme currently has a bug making this dog slow, do some of the others?
3) onyl 2 concurrent devices? how about 5 or 6? I regularly have 7 or 8. I notice performance drops off consistently just based on the number of connected devices, even if only one is "in use" actively downloading, and want to know if some routers hold out better with that.
4) no feature comparison chart?
How much did you guys test the shareport function? (Not much from what it looks like). The shareport function hooked up to an external hard drive only works if you are transferring a file or two using windows. It totally fails when you try to us it with a 3rd party backup program (such as acrea). I personally haven't tried connecting a printer to shareport. I also couldn't get it to work using eraser (a disk erasing utility. I concluded that it just doesn't work with third party apps. So far, none of the driver, firmware or shareport software updates have fixed this problem.
D-link does have a nice forum on their site where people can post their problems. For fixable problems, other users will helpfully solve your problems. For unsolvable problems (shareport being one of them) the user complaints just keep piling up. Rarely do d-link's own tech support grace the forums. Apparently, D-link is currently collecting all of the shareport grips and cataloging them. Ostensibly, this will result in a fix at some point in the future. Still waiting.