Level One Wireless Router WBR-6000

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.

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.