| Wireless Performance | Rating  |
And here we get to the meat and potatoes of the review. Standard testing methods for networks talk about the throughput and response time. That's sort of boring. Let's look instead at the two things that make a wireless N network desirable: speed and range. For this, we'll use speedtest.net and a ThinkPad T61p notebook with built-in Intel 4695 AGN wireless.
Testing Method
My office is actually a dedicated, set-aside space in a barn. It was originally a storage room, but with an added outside door, a couple of windows, and some creature comforts like floor covering, it became a welcoming working room. The house is eighty feet away. The barn is wood framed with vinyl siding, and the Trendnet was placed in a rear corner. Standing with the antennas straight up, the Trendnet was placed at a 45° angle to the corner walls and the base of the unit was fifty-two inches from the floor. We did some measurements in the house, and then we put the laptop in the car and drove around the place some. We used Vista's "Connect to" dialog to determine the signal strength and used Speedtest.net over the Wi-Fi connection to test the speed. We tracked our progress with a GPS device, and we converted the latitude and longitude readings to distance using the coordinate distance calculator at http://boulter.com/gps/distance/.
Testing Results
Baseline - in the office, the laptop provided 3921 kb/s down and 394 kbs up. Results taken outside were:
- 303 ft - Signal Good - 4146 down, 357 up
- 187 ft - Signal Excellent 4115 down, 401 up (straightline view)
- 199 ft - Signal Good - 4320 down, 375 up (on the opposite side of the house)
- 226 ft - Signal Good - 4139 down, 375 up
And, upon returning, we recorded 4232 kb/s down and 367 kb/s up.
We found that the throughput remained good as long as the laptop had good or excellent reception. Once it fell to fair, webpage timeouts and page not found errors began to occur. In the longer distance test, which included 303 feet of slightly uphill terrain, we found that going just a few feet past the high point caused the connection to degrade rapidly. When the reception was rated as poor, Vista disconnected. Once this happened, we had to get much closer than the last successful connection point in order for it to reconnect.
This suggested that a Draft N connection is tenacious and fast, but once you exceed the comfortable range, it rapidly degrades and becomes useless. Fortunately, a large umbrella of coverage is formed, especially in comparison to my previous "Super 108" setup. Super 108 or Super G is a dual wireless G connection that requires a matching card in the laptop from the same manufacturer as the base station. This network barely reached into the house 80 feet away.
Results inside, by the way, were comparable, in that all attempts rated a good connection, and it was consistent in every room of the house. We won't list the test results here, but suffice it to say that neither the laptop nor the Trendnet had any trouble maintaining both the connection and throughput.
Conclusion
And that's the Bright Hub Review of the Trendnet TEW 633GR wireless N router. Although I've had a N-capable notebook for over a year now, this was the first time it's been used with a wireless N network. I was absolutely startled by the first connection, in which I decided to take the notebook outside and see how far I could stay connected to the network. I stayed within line-of-sight, and the connection dropped at what I later determined to be 723 feet.
Of course, I later found out that the router tries to decrease the connection speed when the signal from the client is weak. In more formal subsequent testing, I found that the range of a good or excellent connection is very much limited by terrain. This is the distance within which you can actually connect to the Internet and do useful things. After that, things degrade suddenly and totally. (It reminds me of digital TV signals. You either get them or you don't. There's no half-way point.)
Test 3, the one at 199 feet from the router, was actually on the other side of our two-story house. The signal had to pass through at least four sets of walls, or did it?
Maybe not. Wireless N networks use MIMO, for multiple input-multiple output, which depends on a reflected multipath signal, or parts of the data coming in from slightly different paths. Since I don't know what path the signals followed to reach my laptop, I can't definitely say whether most of it, all of it, or some of it actually had to pass through the house.
But that's sure what it looked like to me.
So should you run out and purchase a Trendnet wireless-N router? (I'm sure that would make Trendnet happy if you did.) It's a very fast and economical wireless N router with mainstream features and attractive modern styling. If you already have a laptop that is wireless N-capable, it's a great accessory to liven up and replace your wireless ad-hoc network. Should you worry about the 802.11n standard still being in draft? I think not. I used a Lenovo laptop with an Intel chipset for testing, and it worked great with the Trendnet. I think it's not likely that the standards body will break what's already out there working.
300Mbps Wireless N Gigabit Router - MSRP $112.99