Level One's latest broadband wireless router supports 802.11n draft
specification, and we received it with Level One's USB, PCMCIA and PCI wireless
adapters. The draft N specification supports throughput of up to 300 Mbps and is
also backward compatible with 802.11b and g specs.
The router itself has a web management interface allowing you to manage it
from any machine on the network. One good management feature here is that it
lets you create user groups based on IPs and then implement different policies
for each group. Policies include URL filtering, Internet access control, etc.
The router also supports all the regular wireless security features like WEP,
WPA or WPA2. Another useful option is QoS (Quality of Service), which lets you
set priorities for different kinds of traffic like HTTP, FTP, SMTP, VoIP, IPSEC,
etc.
The router has a built-in firewall, DHCP server, DMZ support and even a
virtual server. The last feature allows users on the Internet to access servers
that reside on your LAN. It also supports multi-DMZ, so you can configure this
router to let PCs on your LAN communicate with a server or another PC on the
Internet. Another useful option for offices is 'Scheduling,' whereby the
policies set for a URL filter and a firewall can be scheduled to be active at
certain times. For example, if you want to block Yahoo during office hours and
unblock it for the remaining period, then simply create a rule to block Yahoo in
URL filter and schedule it to be active during office timings and remain
inactive otherwise. The only disadvantage with this device is that its ports
work at 10/100 Mbps, which means that if you are copying any file from a server
connected to its DMZ port you, will get 100 Mbps speed even though your wireless
network is capable of data exchange at 300 Mbps.
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We tested the router by connecting it to a machine directly with a cable. We
then accessed this machine over the router's wireless network. We used the
wireless cards that came with the router for this purpose. We first tested for
wireless throughput, for which we ran the QCheck benchmark. This gave us a TCP
throughput of 47 Mbps while transferring 1000 kb of payload, which is an average
throughput for an N draft router. The D-Link RangeBooster N650 WiFi Router
(reviewed in August 2007) gave us 76 Mbps . The router gave a response time of 1
ms which is excellent. We then transferred 50 MB of data, consisting mainly of
documents, presentations, spreadsheets and music files. The process took 26 secs
which is pretty good as compared to the earlier g compatible routers that take
48 seconds on average for the same. It's also slightly better than the D-Link
Range Booster which took 30 seconds.
Bottomline: Given its features, the router is a
good solution for small offices wanting to build a small wired as well as a
wireless network.