Linksys has long been a popular home router brand. The products tend to be simple, durable, well-supported, and at least meet performance expectations. In working with prior Linksys models, we’ve had few complaints but also not many occasions to gush with praise. Just looking at the WRT610N ($169.99) out of the box, we wondered if things were about to change. This dual-band beauty doesn’t seek to distract with fancy LCD displays. Rather, a sleek profile, glossy and rounded like a fine sports car, conveys simple elegance and speed.
There are two kinds of dual-band routers: those that let you connect via 2.4 GHz or 5.0 GHz and those (like the WRT610N) that let you do both simultaneously. Simultaneous dual-band (SDB) doesn’t mean you get to bond both radios into one super-fast connection and get a 600 Mb/s router out of two 300 Mb/s functions. However, you can have different clients connecting to whichever frequency is better suited to the occasion. For example, you might want video streaming to a media extender running over 5.0 GHz, since there’s likely to be less traffic in this range, while general PC data goes across 2.4. Because of our test environment, we expected to see much faster performance on the 5.0 GHz band, but results showed similar numbers for both bands across several (but not all) tests. Perhaps this is why some people have written off SDB as an unnecessary expense. We disagree. In a setting crowded with 2.4 GHz traffic, having that full performance 5.0 GHz alternative can be a life-saver.
Under its gleaming hood, the WRT610N sports four gigabit Ethernet ports, custom QoS settings according to program and port range, and a single USB port for external storage. With this, you can create rights-based NAS, an FTP server, and a UPnP/DLNA media server. The WRT610N doesn’t dazzle with breakthrough features, but it covers all the basics, hits the extra server, QoS, and storage features power users want most, and, as we’ll see, has the performance goods that really justify its price tag.
Note: Just days before publication, Cisco unveiled its new E-series routers. The top-end model from this group is the E3000, which, except for a slight cosmetic change and the inclusion of Cisco’s Connect software (primarily for guest access and parental control setup), looks to be a complete repeat of the WRT610. In fact, Cisco Connect is simply a spruced up version of the Network Magic Basic software bundled with the WRT610. We can’t say for certain that the two models perform identically, but with both featuring six internal antennas in a 2x2 array configuration, an extreme similarity sure wouldn’t surprise us.
- 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.