Product Reviews

Most MIMO routers have at least three aerials, but TRENDnet's 108Mit/s 802.11g MIMO Wireless Router has only two. We were interested to see how this would affect its performance. The web-based control panel looks plain, but two wizards help you configure your internet connection and turn wireless security on. The router supports all the current security levels, including WPA2. We're not sure why a single wizard couldn't handle this, though.

Strangely, it forced us to use channel six for its wireless connection, and changing to a different channel disabled the

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turbo mode. This is annoying as switching channel helps you avoid interference. Accessing advanced features, such as the firewall and port forwarding, was also slow, even over a 100Mbit/s wired connection.

We ran our performance tests using the recommended settings, but we were hardly bowled over. With a Centrino notebook we recorded worse results than with our standard 802.11g router, especially at long range.

We also had some trouble when the PC, which was connected through one of the wired ports, lost its connection and was unable to talk to the router. We solved this by rebooting the router, but this also made our PC change IP address. All clients frequently changed IP address, which could be a problem if you have a printer that needs to keep the same address.

Using TRENDnet's MIMO PC Card (£45), our tests started off badly, as the client was unstable and made our PC crash. Removing it and using the Windows Wireless Zero Configuration utility stabilised performance, but the results were far from impressive.

This router didn't perform anywhere near as well as we'd hoped, so we still recommend Buffalo's High Power router.