Wireless networking is one of those things that we all have come to rely on. We tend to expect to be able to connect just about anywhere now. I mean, even McDonalds has wireless now so why shouldn’t we? But what do you do when you come across one of those places that either does not have it, has poor quality (like many hotels) or you are just concerned about your security when on those open networks? Well there are a few companies that have a solution to this and we are going to take a look at one from EDIMAX today. It is one of the world’s smallest 802.11n wireless routers the EDIMAX BR-6258n.
Performance - The performance of any wireless device 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 the BR-6258n we ran it in multiple configurations to ensure that we covered the spectrum of possible performance. We ran the BR-6258n in wired mode, wired to wireless and wireless to wireless. With each of these we tested basic throughput and how responsive the network “felt”. Our experience with the BR-6258n was good. It was not the fastest router we have tested, but it was more than sufficient to get the job done. We were even able to do quite a bit of gaming with this file transfers were decent and we found that we could move files around without too much difficulty. Reception - This was very surprising. We were able to reach quite a few wireless access points with decent signal strength that are not always visible to the internal adapters on our test laptop and the Asus EEE Slate we now use for testing.Link Speed -The box says 150Mbps and surprisingly that is what we got. We are used to smaller devices like this getting a little less than what they advertise but for both wireless connections we were able to maintain a solid 150Mbps connection. We do want to mention that when we ran n Wireless to the LAN port we lost some speed, you are dropping from 150Mbps to 100Mbps as the RTL8196c cannot handle more than that. 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. As we mentioned above we had no issues at all over the wireless or wired connections. We did notice a slight speed decrease when running wireless to wired but was due to the Ethernet controller in the BR-6258n. One of these days we will finally see one of these with a full GBe switch in it. Maybe when someone builds a 450Mbps version we will get to that.
