Looking back through the archives, we noticed that it had been a long time—indeed, a long, lonely time—since we’d taken a hard look at the wireless networking space, and for that we apologize. With so many amazing things happening in the worlds of CPUs, GPUs, storage, and such, it’s easy to overlook networking. After all, with 802.11n now a finalized standard and the nearly identical Draft 2.0 spec appearing in retail products since mid-2007, there haven’t exactly been any bombshells in the wireless world lately.
And yet...the rest of the market hasn’t stood still. Since the dawn of Draft 2.0, we’ve seen the rise of netbooks, smartphones embracing dual-radio cellular and WiFi, an ever-increasing array of wireless home theater and VoIP devices, and even the first steps toward making cars into hot spots (think Microsoft SYNC). Add to this the unstoppable march to widespread high-def video streaming across any number of platforms and devices. The need for a solid WiFi foundation in your home is bigger than ever.
When early draft 802.11n gear first came available, we were decidedly underwhelmed. It was only marginally better than 802.11g on a good day, especially if you were using one of the dual-channel “turbo” versions. Without channel bonding, it was common for us to see real world, sustained 802.11a or g throughput in the 15 Mb/s range. By 2006, we had multiple antennas and MIMO technology (spatial multiplexing and the sending of discrete data sub-streams along different paths within a single radio link) along with an upgrade to the fetal 11n spec, and sustained throughput jumped to anywhere from the 40s to the 80s in Mb/s. Performance was all over the board and patch updates seemed to be raining from the sky for a while, but everyone eventually realized that we were never going to get even remotely close to that promised 300 Mb/s 11n spec. The wireless-loving public realized, yet again, that vendors had overhyped and underdelivered...and interest in 11n waned.
The thing is that, for better or worse, vendors still need to sell product. Perhaps they were at the mercy of the radio chip manufacturers on wireless performance, but they could still innovate and improve designs in other regards. Now in 2010, the days of simple routers that do little more than offer a few switched LAN ports and handle wireless communications are all but over. If the idea of wireless performance is to make computing life more convenient, then secondary router features definitely serve this same purpose—or should. As we discovered, not all feature implementations are equally brilliant.
We lined up recent releases from Asus, Belkin, D-Link, Linksys, Netgear, Ruckus Wireless, TP-Link, TRENDnet, and ZyXEL, crafted our testing setup, and let the cage match begin. Without further ado, let’s dig in and see what a broad walk through today’s WiFi router scene has to offer the discerning power user.
- 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.