Netgear and Linksys get draft-n routers reviewed
With all the pain associated, usually there's a bit of a pay-off for early adopters. They are, after all, playing with the "latest and greatest," right? Doesn't seem to be the case with the three new draft-n routers that just hit the market. We already hit up the disappointing Buffalo WZR-G300N, and it seems Netgear's WNR854T and Linksys' WRT300N fared little better. In fact, neither product managed to best its own predecessor. The PC Mag reviewer did have a lot of love for the actual setup and feature set of both of these products, with snazzy parental controls from Linksys and a built-in Gigabit Ethernet switch from Netgear (a first for consumer routers) among the evident router maturity these two companies have reached. Sadly, the fun stopped there, since out of the box neither product managed much connectivity at all, and even after firmware updates the two routers marked up some pretty lame benchmarks. Netgear beat all with 124mbps at 10 feet and 105mbps at 60 feet, but its lame 28mbps at 120 feet and abysmal 2.8mbps at 160 feet were thoroughly trounced by Netgear's own RangeMax 240 pre-n product. Linksys, like Buffalo, didn't even manage a signal at 160 feet, and across the board lost to its own pre-n product, the SRX400. That's gotta hurt. As much as we love that bleeding edge, we think we're going to sit this round out, mmkay?
Read - Netgear WNR854T
Read - Linksys WRT300N
