Product Reviews

DynaMode's BR-6004 W-G1 is a standard 802.11g wireless router with a four-port Ethernet switch. Its selling point is that it costs just £30 including VAT, making it one of the cheapest routers we've seen. It doesn't look cheap, though: its curved case, which can stand horizontally or vertically, looks great. It's also compact, so you can tuck it out of sight easily.

The BR-6004 W-G1 wireless router is not too hard to configure, as it comes with UPnP active, so it should appear in My Network Places once turned on. Configuration is through its web interface. A wizard takes you

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through your internet and wireless settings, but it doesn't prompt you for security settings. This is a shame, as the router supports WEP, WPA and WPA2 encryption. The router supports virtual servers in case you want to set one of your PCs up as a server and access it from over the internet. The interface for this is clean and easy to understand, but it's a manual job, and there are no drop-down boxes configured with the common server settings such as web and FTP.

The BR-6004 W-G1 has a firewall to protect your PCs from internet-based threats, but it's turned off by default. This is annoying, as many people won't look through the more detailed settings and could be left unprotected.

Budget routers usually fall down on throughput, but we didn't have this problem with the BR-6004 W-G1. The small drop-off in speeds between our near and far tests shows that it's a reliable router. It may not have the speed of MIMO or pre-N routers, but it's fast enough for web browsing and light file sharing.

At just £30 including VAT, DynaMode's BR-6004 W-G1 is an inexpensive way of sharing your cable broadband, but the security settings could do with improvement.