Maybe No Encore, But Decent Enough: Encore's 802.11n Wireless Router

The router gave us good bandwidth speeds during testing. The management interface is pretty ho-hum but more important, a bit quirky, as you try to change settings to the router within it.

By default, the router was set at 20MHz channel width. We connected two clients: one a laptop running Windows XP SP 2 using Encore's 802.11n wireless PC card adapter and a second laptop running Windows 7 with an on-board Intel Wireless Wi-Fi Link 4965AGN adapter.

The laptop with the Encore adapter reported an internal bandwidth speed of 130 Mbps. Of course, this is the Windows native meter that reports the speed the wireless adapter's driver tells it, which usually isn't the accurate, real-time speed. Once we switched off Mixed Mode and just set the router to 802.11n and changed the channel width to Auto 20/40MHz, Windows reported a speed of 300 Mbps. On the laptop running Windows 7, which has an older N adapter, we could not get a speed reading higher than 130 Mbps.

Next, we ran some bandwidth tests using SimpleNet Software's Simple Network Tester that gave more real-time speed results. A bandwidth test from one client to the other reported a speed of 129 Mbps. Two tests, one streaming, simulated VoIP traffic, and one streaming video, showed virtually zero jitter during streaming and maxing at 16 milliseconds during transmissions.

The management interface has all the standard controls most router interfaces have. In addition, there are settings for Mac and Domain URL filtering. We set the URL filter to block access to craigslist.org. After applying the filter, we could still access craigslist. After reapplying a second time, the change finally took. The client was denied access to the site, but there was no message from the router stating access to the site was denied, just a plain old DNS error browser page.

The browser also does not come back gracefully from other setting changes. For instance, we switched the device from DHCP to a static IP address. The router took 10 seconds to reset and then gave us a broken link to the home page of the interface. The browser had to be closed and restarted.

In fact, when we fiddled around with the channel band settings, at one point we had to reboot the router, because the clients refused to reconnect to the wireless network.

The management interface supports features like port forwarding, virtual server, NAT and DMZ.

Perhaps we are a bit spoiled by the recent offerings we have seen from competitors like 3Com and D-Link's 802.11n products in this space. Encore's device gets the job done, namely providing wireless access, but its feature set is lacking the robustness of pricier home and SMB routers.