Edimax Triple A Overview

the LAN ports available on the router itself usually are not up to gigabit level, especially for much faster Wireless N routers. When you have Wireless N speeds routed through slower megabit wired connections, you end up with a bottleneck of sorts, resulting in a decrease in overall speed. The Edimax BR-6754n is a wireless 11 b/g/n gigabit broadband router and should eliminate any possible bottleneck at the source. The BR-6754n certainly looks the part with an all white casing and three detachable antennas. Like most other wireless routers, the BR-6754n has four wired LAN Ethernet ports and one WAN port for the Internet line. The router has a WPS/reset button on the back for instant one touch resetting. The overall design is very iPod-like with a white glossy surface that just screams fingerprint magnet. Thankfully, prints aren’t that visible due to the white color. The router also comes with a screw-less vertical stand which is fairly stable and slides out easily if you prefer to have it flat instead. We tried both positions and as usual when you have three antenna routers, the three antennas overlapped each other. This doesn’t seem to have any visible effect on performance but it does look a little messy. This is compounded by the fact that the power line is situated so close to one of the antennas, which makes it seem even messier. This router is definitely one of the faster routers on the block, but it never actually reaches its full 300MBps speed. At most the router manages to reach a stable 144MBps, especially when close to the access point. For the most part this connection does not break even when quite far away with several walls and magnetic fields interfering with the connection. Speeds do drop somewhat when further away but not by too much. This results in fast transfer speeds of 4 to 5 minutes to copy 1GB worth of data, regardless of distance. Reliability is also not that much of an issue as the router is quite stable, with fairly minor fluctuations throughout. Setting up the router is relatively easy, just follow the wizard step by step and cancel it if you don’t want to set up an Internet line just yet. As usual, you can just hook it up and access the browser based setup screen for the manual method, just remember to have all the keys and addresses on hand. The setup interface is fairly simplistic and shouldn’t be too much trouble for most experienced networking technicians. The Edimax BR-6754n router is an excellent wireless N router. The assured gigabit LAN connections promise better overall speeds while the router’s good range and stability should make it fairly popular. Depending on price (since it doesn’t use cheaper megabit LAN connections) this router should be a reasonable addition to any wireless network seeking to upgrade to a faster wireless N connection. The router’s settings screen A great pure gigabit wireless N router that is both speedy and reliable Out of 10 8.5 Physique: 8.5 Features: 8.5 Performance: 8.5 User Friendliness: 8.5 Value: 8.5 HWM’S VERDICT Available at Model : BR-6754n Router Antennas : 3x (detachable) Wired Network Switch Ports : Gigabit Wireless Compatibility : IEEE 802.11n (draft), 802.11g and 802.11b compliant Vertical Option : Yes QoS Support : Yes USB2.0 (480Mbps) Port : No Router Package : Network cable, antennas, printed manual, wizard disc, power adapter, vertical stand Warranty : One-year Contact : Techdata Systems Sdn Bhd Telephone : (03) 8070 1633 URL : www.edimax.com SPECIFICATIONS Max Speed 300Mbps WiFi N Triple A(ntenna) Router Edimax Wireless 11 b/g/n Gigabit Broadband Router BY Muzaffar Ismail QoS Yes Tests: Test Distances 100% 100% 100% 25% (63Mbps) 35% (97Mbps) 45% (144Mbps) 4 minutes 5 minutes 5 minutes Average Signal Average Throughput 1GB Copy time Distance 02 meters 10 meters 20 meters 144Mbps 130Mbps 87Mbps Average Speed All wireless tests are conducted via a generic notebook with the provided USB wireless client adapter using the latest drivers and firmware. Performance is gauged at varying distances by moving the notebook around, while the tested wireless router stays above a server rack case. The router is connected via a network cable to a test computer’s Gigabit (1Gbps) port. 1GB of data, of various file sizes, is copied over the wireless network. The tests take into account obstacles like people and partitions, and hence the results can vary with different environments. Router RM 325 Reviewed >> COMPUTERS CONSUMER ELECTRONICS COMMUNICATIONS SEP 2008 157