Product Reviews

UPDATED: price correction - the correct price is £47.

In a world where most homes and offices have broadband connections, wireless ADSL routers are ten a penny, so finding ways to distinguish between them has become the preoccupation of manufacturers. ZyXEL's Prestige 660HW is a product that will stand out from the crowd thanks to its combination of features, advanced technology and ease of use.

Configuring a wireless broadband router isn't always simple, so we were sceptical about the Prestige's promise of zero-configuration internet access. But this was unfounded because provided the Prestige is plugged correctly into your ADSL-enabled phone line, it

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automatically detects all the required settings. All you have to do is enter your ISP's user name and password, and it does the rest. we wish other manufactuers would take a leaf from Zyxel's book. You can access other features, such as the wireless encryption settings, through a fairly standard web setup page. Once you're logged in, a bit of browsing reveals many features for advanced users. For example, there's a useful media bandwidth management section that allows you to control the amount of bandwidth used by certain applications. There's also a sophisticated firewall with built-in content filtering and a range of other features - a handy addition for security conscious users. The Prestige is future-proof too, as it supports the ADSL 2/2+ standards, which will offer higher ADSL speeds when they become widely available.

We didn't expect the Prestige to deliver the high transfer speeds of the draft-n and MIMO wireless routers we reviewed last month. It costs a lot less than those products, so all it had to do to justify its price was perform well enough for most home users. Unfortunately, it only managed 8.8Mbit/s in our short-range test and 4.3Mbit/s in our long-range test - both speeds are well below what we'd expect of an 54Mbit/s 802.11g network.