TRENDnet TEW-692GR Pro Reviews

The Trendnet TEW-692GR Dual Band Wireless Router is a small and unobtrusive device that comes with three antennae to deliver a stronger - and wider - wireless signal.

A superfast router, but it's expensive and lacks USB connectivity

The Trendnet TEW-692GR is a well-made mainstream product. It doesn’t offer too many extra features, but it can connect your LAN to the internet using all popular connection methods. It can fully utilize the 100 Mbps bandwidth in most operation modes whereas its L2TP performance is limited to 60 Mbps. If you’ve got a Gigabit Ethernet channel, the router will only be able to use one third of its bandwidth with direct connection. As opposed to many other top-end routers, this model lacks USB ports and is limited to internet access and Wi-Fi networking. It supports both frequency bands of the 802.11n standard and you can enjoy Wi-Fi speeds up to 100-200 Mbps by selecting appropriate setup options and client devices. Priced at $130, the TEW-692GR looks an attractive offer in its class of 3T3R dual-band routers but you should make sure its performance in specific scenarios is high enough for you. The TEW-680MB adapter, on its part, is interesting with its support for two Wi-Fi bands and as many as four Gigabit Ethernet ports. It may come in handy for connecting TV-sets and media players, ensuring high speed in the 5GHz band. Its price of $90 is justified by its high performance.

I'm probably sounding like a broken record, but the TEW-692GR hasn't done anything to change my mind about the value (or lack thereof) of three stream N. If you need further convincing, just look at Table 2. It pulls together the best case throughput from my testing for each of the eight test runs performed and shows the throughput improvement gained by switching from two to three stream N. Keep in mind these are best case gains. In many cases, and especially once signal levels drop to medium and lower signal levels, the performance gain is much less, if anything at all. It's interesting that the best gain happens to be for 2.4 GHz, 40 MHz bandwidth mode, the most bandwidth hogging, least neighbor-friendly mode you can run. And the least gain is for the mode you'd most want to use, i.e. 5 GHz, 40 MHz bandwidth mode. At any rate, given its poor range performance even in 2.4 GHz and unimpressive 5 GHz performance, I have to say that TRENDnet's TEW-692GR isn't the best choice you could make if you just have to have three-stream N in both bands simultaneously.

The Trendnet TEW-692GR 450 Mbps Concurrent Dual Band Wireless N router provides cutting-edge wireless technology but falls a little short on 2.4Ghz throughput performance, comparatively.