We wanted to throw in at least one wild card in this roundup. TRENDnet’s TEW-654TR ($58.89) is a travel router measuring just 2.4 x 3.2 x 0.7 inches. The pocket-sized marvel weighs just 1.6 ounces. It features two internal 2.4 GHz antennas and is rated to cover about a 160-foot radius under indoor conditions—plenty big to cover the hotel rooms it’s meant for unless you’re hob-nobbing at the top of the Venetian.
The idea is that instead of being stuck at a tiny desk with an uncomfortable chair, you plug the router into the room’s Ethernet feed and kick back in your bed with either your laptop’s built-in Wi-Fi or the TEW-624UB dongle TRENDnet throws in with the kit. Of course, if you’ve got several people in the room with you (presumably not in the bed), they can hop on the wireless connection with their own clients.
Be aware that there are no LAN ports on this unit. You get one WAN port and the rest is wireless. Apart from Wi-Fi Multimedia QoS, WPS setup, and the ability to flip the router into an access point mode, there’s not really much else here to discuss. OK, the carrying case is nice, too. And no, the performance we witness was nothing to write home about. This is meant to be a business solution, not a gaming product, and we viewed it as such. All things considered, we thought the little TEW-654TR put in a respectable showing.
We’d hoped to review the TEW-673GRU, TRENDnet’s latest router. The company was kind enough to send us a pre-release model a couple of months ago, but we were unable to get satisfactory results from it. By no small coincidence, the 673GRU still has yet to release as of this writing. Instead, we tested the TEW-671BR ($83.80) TRENDnet had already sent us. We were intrigued to see how this unit fared because, while it’s a simultaneous dual-band model, it only features two 2 dBi external antennas rather than the usual three. However, there are another two 4 dBi internal antennas. For SDB, $84 is a screaming deal—if the router actually performs.
Admittedly, the SDB functionality is sort of the whole TEW-671BR story. The four LAN ports are 10/100. You get the usual base-level QoS features, integrated security, and WPS. Tack on TRENDnet’s three-year warranty and this emerges as a strong budget offering.
- 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.