Before prepping this article, we’d never reviewed any TP-Link gear before. The company, based in Shenzhen, China, has obvious aspirations to be the next D-Link by way of being the low-cost leader of the networking world. They approached us months ago with this hot new technology called “Lite-N.” Enough said, right? Still, we make every effort to clear our minds of high-performance prejudices and remember that most of the world just needs cheap gear that gets the job done. This is TP-Link’s target. In thumbing through the catalog that reps sent us along with the WR741ND ($44.99), we couldn’t find a single visually interesting product. It’s all built to be generic. That’s not necessarily bad, but it clearly shows where TP-Link is aiming.
The WR741ND uses a 2x2 MIMO array, but with a single external antenna. You get four 10/100 LAN ports, no USB connectivity. As with Belkin’s N150, this is an ultra-basic, entry-level, 2.4 GHz router. The QSS (Quick Secure Setup) button on the front is rebranded WPS. About the only thing that stands out here is TP-Link’s integration of very simple QoS.
On the other hand, all of that simplicity makes for a very quick setup. Just for giggles, we handed the router to a total networking newbie here at the office and asked her to set it up. She had it running in under 20 minutes. And to TP-Link’s credit, the manual is surprisingly well-produced, with none of the glaring errors and typos we’re used to seeing from lesser-known vendors. The manual even shows screen captures of successful and failed ping tests, which is exactly the sort of thing novices need to see.
We’ll let the cat out of the bag on this one. The WR741ND was the worst-performing router of this roundup, and that was even with using the company’s own TL-WN721N USB adapter. Still, you can find this router online for $35. If all you need is to connect a handful of clients and don’t care so much about the speed at which it happens, yet you at least don’t want to pack a lunch for a 100MB file backup, then this may still be sufficient.
- 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.