When wireless networking was first introduced it was a very cool concept and people bought into it. The problem was that it was also about as slow as dial-up internet was. The good news is that all technologies advance and wireless was non exception. Once the idea caught on we quickly ramped up in speed, but wireless was never quite able to keep up with a wired connection. We saw these connections leap ahead by a factor of 10 while wireless had small incremental speed jumps. All of that changed in 2011 when researchers built up the next specification for wireless speed, 802.11ac. This speed increase more than doubled what wireless was able to do previously. Suddenly wireless was just as fast as a wired connection (in theory). We have a few routers and adapters in the lab and will be taking a look at them. Today we are going to show you the TRENDNet TEW-812DRU AC1750 dual band wireless router.
The Setup -As is becoming the norm, TRENDNet includes a wizard for both internet and wireless setup. You can get to these by using your favorite browser and heading to 192.168.10.1. Once there the system will open up to the setup page with these two options available. The internet wizard is pretty straight forward and walks you thought getting connected and also testing the connection speed to make sure you are getting what you should. The wireless wizard lets you configure the security for both the 2.4GHz and 5GHz wireless bands. Oddly it does not give you the option to configure the guest wireless network that is available on the TEW-812DRU. Fortunately these networks are off by default. We will walk you through some of the configuration for these when we cover the WebUI.
After you configure your internet and wireless we would recommend configuring a time server so that your router has the proper time. Some systems will not let you connect if you do not have the right time. You also should change the admin password to something you can remember, but is complex enough that a malicious person is unlikely to guess what it is. Leaving the password to default is one of the most common ways hackers get into systems. You can accomplish both of these in the advanced section of the WebUI which we will show you in a minute.
