A slew of innovative features that make this wireless router stand out
amongst the crowd are'free Tomyzone hotspot', solid security and easy
installation. The hotspot feature lets you earn money by making a public SSID
that can be used by WiFi users in a particular area. It's restricted to
customers in New Zealand and Australia only. Besides being 802.11g standard
based router, that is also compatible with 802.11b network, things to look for
are simple installation and configuration. One can configure this router and
then save these configurations on connected machine (file name 'config.bin').
Now this file can be used in case configuration gets lost. For security, among
many features like MAC filtering, internal firewall, WPA encryption, one added
feature is parental control.
To check the performance of this router, we carried out two tests. First we
used 'Qcheck 3.0' to check the UDP and TCP throughput with 1000 Mb of payload.
This router was able to give results of 17 Mbps (UDP) and 21 Mbps (TCP)
respectively. When we compared these results with ASUS WL-520G (reviewed in
April'07) they are almost same. To check the speed of transmission, we
transferred 50 MB of data from a machine that was connected (to DIR-300) using
Ethernet cable to wirelessly connected laptop. The average time taken to
transfer this file was approximately 39 seconds even this is almost equal to
ASUS WL-520G.
Bottomline: It's a wireless G router whereas people nowadays prefer a
wireless N version. Also we hope the hotspot feature is available in India soon.
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