| Buffalo WZR2-G300N Nfiniti Wireless-N Router |
| Reviews - Featured Reviews: Network | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Written by Steven Iglesias-Hearst - Edited by Olin Coles | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Wednesday, 07 October 2009 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Buffalo AirStation WZR2-G300N ReviewThe AirStation WZR2-G300N Wireless-N Nfiniti Router is more than your average router in that it includes an external switch to change between router and access point modes, It can be integrated into your current network and used purely as an access point, or if you are looking to upgrade, it works as a router for your Cable/DSL connection. Designed to IEEE802.11n Draft 2.0 specifications with claims of up to 4x the range and up to 12x the speed over wireless G. Buffalo technology bring a unique level of security native to their airstation product line - The AirStation One-Touch Secure System (AOSS), Put plainly this means if you have another AOSS airstation wireless product, such as a network card in your laptop, you can create a connection simply and securely with the push of a button, much the same as connecting a wireless keyboard to its receiver, This makes good business sense on the side of buffalo - and product compatibility is also a major factor with new innovations. The easy setup CD is just that - Easy, simply pop it in your disc drive and follow the step by step instructions and you'll be up and running in under 5 minutes.
With all these features this should prove to be a great product, The style of the router is a little old school but i like that - I'm not a big fan of white plastic or over built bulky products. About Buffalo TechnologyBuffalo is a global manufacturer of innovative storage, multimedia, and wireless networking products for the home and small business. The company is recognised as the Number 1 total PC peripheral manufacturer in Japan, and was the worldwide consumer NAS market leader in 2005, 2006, 2007 and 2008 (In-Stat). The company's storage products are addressing the needs of the individual and the business, providing cost-effective network attached storage (NAS), portable and desktop hard drives, multimedia players, Wireless LAN routers and a versatile line of USB flash drives, which together offer a complete and integrated solution for the small office and digital home environment. Buffalo's product portfolio includes its TeraStation NAS devices which are specifically designed to bring Enterprise storage to the SMB. The LinkStation range of NAS products, takes multimedia NAS to the home. The LinkStation Live & Mini enables you to create a central location to store files, photos and music, simply and easily. The NfinitiTM range of easy-to-use, high performance wireless networking products for the SMB/SoHo and home user, with industry-leading AOSSTM (AirStation One-Touch Secure System) technology, allows users to build and manage secure wireless networks at home or in the office at the push of a button. Buffalo's strong international industry alliances with companies such as Intel, BroadcomTM, Nintendo and Microsoft have allowed it to lead the industry in the development of the latest technologies into practical tools for the business and the home. Headquartered in Japan, Buffalo Technology has offices in the UK, France, The Netherlands, Germany, USA and Taiwan. Buffalo AirStation FeaturesWireless networking is an important factor in homes and offices around the world, The big companies keep releasing new devices on a regular basis, you now have so many options that it's hard to make a choice. Regardless of how many things a wireless router or access point can do, the two most important things about them are their speed and their range Wireless
Security
Convenience
Performance
WZR2-G300N SpecificationsWireless Lan Interface:
Wired Lan Interface:
Wan Interface:
Others:
Closer Look: Buffalo AirStationLets take this opportunity to get a good look at the Buffalo WZR2-G300N and what it has to offer us.
This router looks like it belongs in a corporate environment, but at the same time it doesn't look out of place on my own computer desk. I personally like the look, it was a very important factor when I was looking at different products, there are just too many companies that tend to follow the same design brief and bring nothing original to the table. 
Inside the box was the unit itself, a 110-240v power adaptor to provide the WZR2-G300N with 12v, which comes with 2 detachable leads for connecting to the wall socket, (3 pin plug for uk and 2 pin plug for continental) and a very short (22") Cat5 lan cable, although small, it is slim-lined like a sata cable so I decided to use it seeing as my cable modem sits only 1 foot away. Also included are the quick setup guide and 2 CD's - The quick setup guide is pretty much useless, although multi-lingual, it just tells you to insert the blue Router and Access point cd and follow the step by step instructions detailed on that disc, and provided information on how to use the AOSS feature (also found on the blue cd). I also found no use for the red client adaptor cd - which also includes user manuals for various products made by Buffalo, as the manual for my product was missing, there was however a manual for a wzr-g300n which i will assume is a first revision, suffice to say I found the information I was looking for on the Buffalo tech website.
The WZR2-G300N Doesn't take up too much room on your desk and provides adequate venting for any heat that might build up - although if your space is limited you may want to consider standing it on its side, this can be done without extra clips or attachments (unlike my last router), the right hand side is flat and the router stands just fine on its own. Buffalo WZR2-G300N Detailed FeaturesOne noticeable feature standard to wireless N routers are the 3 antenna providing multiple-input and multiple-output, or MIMO for short - Designed to offer better range and speed. Buffalo Tech have given the WZR2-G300N router some features that I personally haven't seen on other routers namely the AOSS feature, for compatible wireless peripherals, its quick and simple to connect your device to the internet, in an age when we have multiple accounts at multiple websites - One less user/pass to remember cant be bad. The down side is that if you have more than one compliant device you can only connect one at any time using this feature.
The location and size of the AOSS button means that it wont be missed, it would have been nice to have an LED inside the button so that you get some sort of visual feedback when it is use, as only one device can be connected to AOSS at any given time.
Standard status led layout with the addition of a Security led. The Power, Wireless, Router, Internet and Lan led's glow green, Security led glows amber, and if there is a problem, the Diag led glows red.
Standard 4 port Lan layout, For the more novice users the ethernet port is colored blue to distinguish it from the lan ports. The switch on the right is for switching between Router and Access point mode, Note this is a hardware switch and as such it is advised that your preferred mode should be selected whilst power is disconnected to prevent any complications that may occur. Testing & ResultsTesting MethodologyTo fully test this router and find its true potential it would have been ideally paired up with a Buffalo Tech Wireless N network adaptor, Unfortunately this wasn't available and I had to make do with what I had, an Atheros AR5007 802.11b/g Wi-Fi adaptor build into my Compaq Presario CQ61-110SA. There are many different ways of testing your network and for this review I wanted to concentrate on the following things
To measure speed I have used the online speed test @ speedtest.net. I went to different locations within my home and ran the speed test 3 times, I averaged out the 3 results to give each location its score. After testing the various rooms of my home I wanted to know if the results would be similar outside my house both out back in my garden, and out front where I expected to find more interference. I used the same method described above to score each location. For the purpose of this test the distances stated are rough estimates at best, and are within 1m - 2m accurate. I also set up my PC to stream to my Xbox 360 through a wired connection, just to see if the router was able to cope with this sort of activity. More about this later. Test System
ResultsThere are a lot of aspects that can affect your wireless network such as signal reflection, Channel population, Channel pollution and the power to reach ratio - corporate Wi-Fi hotspots will have a much more powerful antenna providing a much stronger signal providing better range and speed. Lets see how this SOHO / home user router performs. I have a 20Mbps package with my ISP, I did a speed test on my PC through a wired connection for reference purposes to see how the wireless speed compares.
As you can see my wired connection gives me a downspeed of 16.6Mbps average and a upspeed of 0.73Mbps average. Throughout my home the signal is excellent and the speed is consistent, The router didn't give me the same speed wireless as wired but this is to be expected as there are at least 5 fair to strong network signals around me. So before I went outside to do the second part of the test I amended my wireless configuration and set wireless channel to auto - a feature that selects a vacant channel on which to operate, I also changed channel bonding from 20 MHz to 20/40 MHz - a method to increase wireless transmission throughput.
As I had previously thought, Distance was going to have an effect on downspeed, but to my surprise, not as much as I had expected. Outside at the rear of the house the signal strength was still fair up to 23m which was my limit (end of the garden), and yielded the best results. Out front of my house at 8m you will notice a dip, I think this was due to me moving down the road perpendicular to the router rather than in a straight line as I did when measuring speed in the rear garden. However the speed still remained semi-consistent even though signal strength suffered. Outside at the front of my house I experienced dropped connections at around 25m and beyond, I wasn't able to get consistent results beyond 25m so this is where I set my boundary. At 18m I had a 2 bar signal strength and at 25m I had 1 bar signal strength. I think the reason why I got better results out back than out front is probably due to the living rooms of the houses on my street are all at the front of the house looking out to the street (with the living room being the favoured place to install the router) this would mean any wireless connections in homes on the opposite side of the road would be too weak to interfere with tests in the back garden due to range limitations. AirStation Wi-Fi-N Final ThoughtsI have yet to find any real problems with this router - the firmware isn't up to date - but its like the bios of your motherboard - if there isn't a problem then don't flash it as you could render it useless, like i did with my last router from netgear. I am able to get into the user configuration of the router by going to 'My Network Places' in XP and 'Networks' in Vista and simply clicking on an icon, rather than opening a browser window and typing 192.168 etc, the router has an option in the setup, under gaming ports, to enable or disable UPnP - Setting up the internet gateway function of UPnP: On a PC which supports UPnP (WindowsXP, etc.), AirStation is automatically recognized on the LAN as an internet gateway.Also, if a network application which supports UPnP is used, it can acquire the INTERNET port status of AirStation and the INTERNET IP address obtained from your ISP and perform port forwarding automatically, so you won't have to set up port forwarding. As I mentioned earlier, I also set up my PC to stream to my Xbox 360 using a wired connection, My PC's operating system is XP pro and as such I couldn't connect to my Xbox 360 using media center, this left me with only a few options (Upgrade to Vista or downgrade to XP MCE - neither of which was an option I wanted to choose) or, Use 3rd party software to share the media. Suffice to say I went with the latter.
The 1st program I chose was ORB - from https://www.orb.com/ The setup was quick and easy and the footprint was rather light too, the download weighing in just under 23mb. After you install you set up a free account - for use with other features provided by orb which I wasn't personally interested in, I only wanted to stream local files to the console. I only needed to change 1 setting and that was in preferences where I pointed ORB to my 'Downloads' directory as a place to look for video files to stream. All my other files were in the default windows folders so I didn't need to specify any other directories. Next I moved on to the Xbox 360, this was even easier - select one of the music, pictures or video tabs and select 'computername##ORB' from the list and hey presto there's the files. While browsing through pictures and music there was no lag whatsoever almost as if i was browsing the files on my own PC, although when i started to watch a film after about 5 minutes of watching i started to get some lag issues. The next program I tried was one I found on the microsoft Xbox 360 official website - This program is called Zune -from https://www.zune.com/ Once again setup was quick and easy, but I encountered a different problem. I wasn't interested in looking at my pictures on my tv (that's what the pc is for) and likewise I prefer to listen to my music through my 7.1 surround sound attached to my PC, All that I wanted to do was stream my films from my PC to my TV using the Xbox 360 as the media streamer, however Zune only supports 3 video formats - m4v, mp4 and wmv, and my films are in AVI format, so I converted a film to mp4 and proceeded to the Xbox 360 where as before with orb i selected the video tab and chose 'computername ## zune' from the list and selected the converted video, I am pleased to say that it played flawlessly all the way through with no lag - i think this may be due to the fact that the converted video was 60% the size of the original 800Mb, but regardless of this fact the quality was still great. So the router may not be able to cope with bigger files or maybe it was software limitations on the side of ORB, I will never know as i have settled with zune, The router is more than capable of streaming the video with zune. I like the style, I like the simplicity, I like how it grabs your attention in a 'hey.... look at me' sort of way, its style is bold but it doesn't brag about it, unlike some routers I've seen on the market. Buffalo WZR2-G300N ConclusionThe Box was a little larger than i had expected, Although it is full of information, It tells you everything you might need to know when choosing between one brand over another - very informative. As I stated earlier in the review, I bought this router with as much emphasis based on looks as features - I remember trawling through different wireless N products and then coming along this, It really caught my eye and i like it even better in person - I really cant find fault with it. Made with good strong materials and very lightweight, the solid black case really sets it out from the rest. I even gave each of the antenna a good twist and pull and they didn't come away unlike another router I used to have. Functionality is simple, a step by step guide on a cd has you up and running in minutes, and the web based interface (accessible via 'My Network Places') was easy to configure with clear precise instructions and definitions of each feature - suitable for novice and advanced users alike. No longer available on newegg - Our price comparison tool has it the Buffalo WZR2-G300N for as low as $149.99 . But if you are like me, and you live in the UK, you can look at pricegrabber uk and pick one up for only £42.95. Pros:
+ Stylish Looks Cons:
- Lack of printed documentation Ratings:
Final Score: 8.7 out of 10.Questions? Comments? Benchmark Reviews really wants your feedback. We invite you to leave your remarks in our Discussion Forum.
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