Home networking is something that everyone knows a little about. Often times what they know is not accurate (to put it nicely). I have heard some of the most bizarre “facts” about home networks, wireless networking and pretty much everything under the sun. We here at DecryptedTech are officially kicking off our networking section with a review of the TRENDNet TEW-687GA; this is a 450Mbps wireless adapter (sort of). We first saw this back at CES when we had our meeting with Zak from TRENDNet. It is a rather large adapter that boasts the full Duplex speed of 450Mbps at a price of $94.99. Let’s take a look at this product and talk a little about wireless networking in general.
Performance - The performance of any wireless adapter is going to have multiple parts, just like any type of hardware. We are going to take a look at the ones we feel are the most important to consumers. The first is simply raw performance. To test this we connected the TEW-687GA to our test laptop and measured the average through put from multiple distances. We added in an extra factor in we tested with both a 450Mbps router (the TRENDNet TEW-691GR) and a Dual Band 300Mbps router the TRENDNet TEW-673GRU. The distances were inside ten feet with direct line of site, 35 feet with no line of site and 50 feet with no line of site.
As you can see the results of our 450Mbps testing are impressive, but then again every wireless adapter that we connected to the TEW-691GR did much better than they did on the 300Mbps router. Reception - The TEW-687GA had some excellent range, but then again is has some extra room for an antenna. (there are three in there). TRENDNet actually setup an internal MIMO (Multiple in Multiple out) antenna to get you the best possible reception and even good data transfer when reception is not at its best.Link Speed -Link speed gives you an idea of what your max data transfer will be. If you are connected at 45Mbps then you are not going to have a very fast connection. The downside of wireless is that this connection can vary even if you are stationary. This is because almost anything electrical (and not shielded) can interfere with your reception. The TEW-687GA maintained a 200Mbs connection to the TEW-691GR and a 150Mbps connection to the 673GRU. We were hoping to see that 225Mbps but we never did. Still at 200Mbps you are getting some excellent speed. We also were able to maintain a link speed between 150-200Mbps when connected to the 673GRU, which means you should have great data transfer. Real World Traffic - Our real world testing consists of things like streaming movies (from Netflix and a NAS device), moving large files (a folder with 20GB of pictures) and a video file, web browsing and of course some gaming. The TEW-687GA did a great job with all of these tasks. When we were moving files back and forth the transfer felt like we were connected locally (even though we knew we were not). Our streaming tests were very smooth with not glitches in audio or video even with 1080p video and uncompressed audio.
