ASUS WL-520G Wireless Router

Asus WL-520G comes with an easy-to-use 'EZSetup' wizard, which lets you set

up your wireless and security in hardly a minute. It comes with drivers for both

Windows (Win 98 and above) and Linux. On the security front, it has a Firewall

with NAT and SPI (Stateful Packet Inspection). It also has WPA2, AES and

64/128-bit WEP encryption. This wireless router can be configured from any of

its DHCP clients as it has browser-based



administration. It has one WAN port and four LAN ports and for wireless, it has
an antenna whose indoor range is about 40 m and outdoor (LOS, Light-Of-Sight)

1000 ft (300 m) at 11 Mbps and Indoor 80 ft (25 m), outdoor (LOS) 260 ft (80 m)

at 54 Mbps.

To test this wireless router, we used a ThinkPad R52 notebook supporting both

802.11b and g. The UDP throughput was 19.47 Mbps and TCP throughput was 22.22

Mbps, which is pretty good. The average response time for TCP and UDP was 1 ms,

again pretty decent. For transferring 50 MB of data it took 34 secs. Placing the

wireless notebook at about 20 ft from this router did not show any difference in

the throughput or the response time, which is good. It supports a technology

called Afterburner, which is supposed to boost the throughput by 35%. However,

this requires a separate WiFi card at the client end to work, which was not

shipped with the router. So we couldn't check it out.

Bottom Line: For its features and the price, this wireless router is

good for homes or small offices.