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 TEW-812DRU -The THRENDNet TEW-812DRU has something of a boxy design. This is an interesting move on the part of TRENDNet as many manufacturers are looking into more aesthetic designs. Even the companies that typically sell to business customers. It is not a bad looking product, we were just surprised that the design was older.
We looked at the TEW-812DRU and unfortunately we were not able to get it open without damage to the product. This means that we cannot send you an image of what is inside, but we can draw a few conclusions from the specifications. We know that the TEW-812DRU has three antenna because it is able to push 2.4GHz up to 450Mbps (and the specs list that is has 3). You need three spatial streams to meet this level of performance.TRENDNet gives you five Gigabit RJ-45 port (one WAN, four LAN) for wired connectivity. For wireless you have two concurrent bands to play with (2.4GHz and 5GHz). On the 2.4GHz band you get b, g, and n spec wireless up to 450Mbps. For 5GHz you can push this all the way up to 1300Mbps. You also get the ability to setup a guest network that is completely isolated from your main (admin) network. This is becoming more and more common even in home wireless products. Everyone owns at least one connected device and let them move between their cellular and wireless networks to save on data charges. Having a guest wireless network lets you offer them a connection to the internet without putting your own data at too much risk. TRENDNet lets you setup 3 wireless networks per channel.
TRENDNet gives you another common option, a USB port which you can use to connect an external drive. From there you can setup file sharing and turn the TEW-812DRU into a basic NAS. You can use this as a streaming media server. Right below this is a reset button so you can restore the TEW-812DRU back to factory settings if you wanted to.
The front of the TEW-812DRU has the typical indicator lights so you know what it going on. To keep things simple the LAN ports lights are numbers that correspond to the port number.
You can check out the full specs for the TEW-812DRU on TRENDNet’s website
