EDIMAX BR-6428nS V3 Review: A Budget Router For SOHO Users

A low cost, single-band 2.4 GHz router that can handle 802.11n devices along good video streaming.

The EDIMAX BR-6428nS V3 is a small, very lightweight router and can be easily fixed anywhere. It supports 300Mbps speed and comes with 5-in1 multifunction Wi-Fi solution that can support IEEE 802.11b/g/n standards. It ships with two external antennas that screw into the back firmly to provide significantly improved coverage. One can use EDIMAX BR-6428nS V3 as a router, access point, range extender, Wi-Fi Bridge or WISO to meet the demands of any network application. Its GUI based smartiQ setup wizard makes it easy to install and setup on few clicks(no cd required).

The rear panel has four 10/100 Ethernet ports, so there's no support for Gigabit Ethernet that disappoints us a little bit. Beside Lan ports its has one WAN ports, a WPS/Reset button and 5v jack for power. In the front, you will find LED indicators: power, Internet, Wireless, WAN, LNK/ACT for LAN.

The router also comes with some security options such as NAT/NAPT IP sharing, 64/128-bit WEP encryption and WPA-PSK and WPA2-PSK security, QoS for critical operations and SPI anti-DoS firewall, all these options are not something great and you will get them almost in every router.

The BR-6428N has the same feature that most of the routers have in its class. It can be used as AP, bridge, or repeater. Edimax's router supports NAT and WPS, and it also has QoS capabilities. It also supports Multi-SSID & VLAN support that enables a user to configure up to five separate SSIDs in order to group and manage users according to requirements. You can also separate private network and Guest Network by isolating the network by using Guest Network option.

While testing the router we were able to get the wireless connection for more than 10 meters after that signal strength weakens drastically due to obstacles. The 300 Mbps wireless BR-6428nS broadband router performed well in testing. We used an isolated ‘N’ network with the router connected to two machines, one wirelessly and the other with cable. Using the ‘Qcheck 3.0′ benchmark, we checked the average throughput with a 1000 KB payload. In this test, we clocked an average speed of 94.3 Mbps which is better than what we tested previously. We transferred 61 MB of data from one machine to the other and here too, the router took 7 seconds only. Using Wi-Fi Network Analyzer, we tested the wireless speed of the router and it resulted in 67 Mbps of speed and -42 dBm of signal strength.