One of the nice things about the latest generation of the 802.11 wireless specification (802.11n) is that there is a lot of headroom available in it before there is a need to move to a new generation. When 802.11n first hit the market it was limited to around 150Mbps. This was due to quite a few factors, most notable of these was the use of spatial streams (breaking the signal into separate streams and reassembling them in proper order at the far end. Once this was combined with MIMO (Multiple In Multiple Out) things really took off. Now we are hitting the upper edge of the 802.11n spectrum with the 450Mbps routers and adapters. This new line is getting up there and finally pushing the upper limits of what you can do with this latest revision of the 802.11 protocol. We have another one of TRENDNet’s 450Mbps wireless routers in the lab. This time it is the TEW-692GR a 450Mbps concurrent dual band gaming router with a price tag of around $135. So follow along as we find out if this is really worth your time and money.
Performance - For our performance testing with the TEW-692GR we needed to use a new adapter (one we have covered before) the TEW-684UB Dual Band 450Mbps USB adapter. We tested this with the TEW-692GR along with our usual suspects (the built in Intel NIC etc). This way we were able to test both the 2.4GHz band and the 5GHz band. We did find that one of our regular adapters (the TEW-664UB) would not connect to either radio. It was immediately disconnected which was disappointing to say the least. Still we were able to get things going and get some performance numbers for you. Unfortunately we only have two wireless routers that are capable of 450Mbps and both are TRENDNet. We are working on adding a few more to our stable here and will be presenting those performance numbers as we get them.Even with only having one brand of router it is pretty easy to see that the newer TEW-692GR picks up the performance a little bit, but only a little bit. It really looks like you are not getting a tremendous speed boost here, but you are getting the advantage of running concurrent wireless networks which can help keep your performance up when there are multiple systems connected.Reception - The range on the TEW-692GR was good when running 2.4GHz. I was able to connect and still get decent speeds (above 10Mbps) even at over 75 Feet away (and through walls). This is actually a little better than the TEW-691GR. Although I was able to connect my speed and performance was not as good. Using the same test at 5GHz my range extended a little and put me out to roughly 85 Feet with the same speed (around 10Mbps). Link Speed -Link Speed is something of a misleading number, but is still important to see. After all if you link is only 54Mbps you are not going to get more than that (no matter how hard you try). The problem with link speed is that not all adapters are made with the same chips in them or the same antenna. So while one adapter might show 220Mbps another might show the full 450. This is not the fault of the access point per se but it can be indicative of an issue. We found that with some wireless devices if we had b, g, and n enabled we would see a lower link speed. Fortunately the TEW-692GR did not have any issues like that. We were able to consistently get the 300 or 450 that we were supposed to. This link speed did decrease with range but for the most part inside the testing area we never dropped below 150Mbps.Real World Traffic - In terms of real world traffic the thing that really impressed us was not the speed (although that is good) it was the way the network handled multiple streams of traffic at the same time. During the testing I added six more systems, two were 450Mbps adapters (one 2.4GHz and one 5GHz) two more were 300Mbps (both 5GHz) and the last two were 300Mbps on the 2.4GHz band. With normally when watching Netflix or any other streaming media I cannot move large files around on the network. With the TEW-692GR I was able to move several 1GB+ files while watching a movie on Netflix, downloading apps to an Android Tablet, playing on-line games with two iPads (one iPad and one iPad2) all without missing a beat. That is impressive no matter how you look at it.
