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.
The Setup -To setup the TEW-692GR you will need to take a few more steps than with some of TRENDNet’s other wireless products. The first thing you need to do is to connect your system to one of the LAN ports (making sure your network card is set for DHCP) from there, power up the TEW-692GR and your system (laptop or desktop). Now once both are up and running you need to open up your web browser of choice and type http://192.168.10.1 and hit enter. It will ask you for a password (the default passwords are in the quick start guide. Type these in and you are in the WebUI and can configure your new toy.The first place you will head over to (if you want to get things running quickly) is to the Wizard button. Here you will get the options to get the both your WAN and your Wireless LAN up and running in a few steps. Of course you will still want to poke around the rest of the WebUI to make sure things are secured and make sure you Change the Admin Password! So now that we have a base configuration let’s head into the WebUI to see what features are available to you with the TEW-692GR.
