Review: 4 Routers Take Wi-Fi To Nth Level

All right—so the high-speed 802.11n standard is still in draft form, but the channel doesn't want to wait to deliver solid, secure, high-performance wireless solutions to every corner of businesses of every size. What are the options?

	Slide Show: 4 Routers Take Wi-Fi To Nth Level

The CRN Test Center has taken a long look at 801.11n wireless routers now shipping from four prominent vendors to the channel. There is good news and bad news.

The bad news: The number of tasks customers want to solve through wireless networking is rapidly increasing. From VoIP to streaming media to growing security concerns, solution complexity continues to build.

The good news: The products reviewed can address many of those customer issues while offering financial rewards to the channel with marginal investment in training.

The latest 802.11n-draft routers are designed to perform better and handle more traffic. Some of the units feature Gigabit Ethernet ports, and all of them contain faster processors and more robust circuitry. Test Center engineers asked vendors to submit their latest 802.11n routers for this roundup.

Engineers evaluated equipment from D-Link Systems, Cisco Systems' Linksys division, Netgear and Trendnet. Each vendor also sent in a "matching" N-draft NIC.

Products based on the forthcoming 802.11n standard can solve some of the real-world problems Test Center engineers have seen caused by the poor performance of 802.11g routers, which commonly buckle under heavy traffic loads.

The N-draft routers were evaluated for quality and reliability, feature set, price/performance, ease of deployment, ease of use and profit potential. They were tested for performance using the SolarWinds Engineer's Toolset, which includes 47 tools for network analysis and diagnostics (www.solarwinds.net). One of the tools is a Real-Time Bandwidth Gauge that can monitor the amount of data being received and transmitted for any network device.

To test each router, engineers installed each vendor's matching N-draft network card in a new dual-core Hewlett-Packard notebook and connected it wirelessly to the router. A second notebook then was connected to one of the router's wired ports. The wireless notebook was configured with a shared folder that could be accessed by the wired notebook. A 100-Mbyte file then was copied from the wired notebook through the router to the shared folder in the wireless notebook; the same file then was copied back the other way. Engineers timed the file transfer and observed the measured performance with the bandwidth gauge.

Engineers tested the routers for compatibility with integrated 802.11n using a brand-new Acer Ferrari 1000 notebook, which contains an integrated Broadcom N-draft wireless chipset. Note that the Ferrari notebook had no trouble connecting to any of the routers.

NEXT: D-Link DIR-655