| Manufacturer: Cisco | Model: Wireless-N Router WAG320N |
| Price: £89.99 | Web: Cisco |
The thing about routers is, you never realise when you have a good one but you sure know when you own a bad one. Good routers sit in a cupboard, or tucked away next to your phone socket and do a pretty amazing, but often forgotten job – serving up your internet to devices all over your home as well as ensuring all of those devices can communicate with each other. A good router truly delivers a “set and forget” experience – plug it in, set up your wireless connection, connect your devices and let’s hope you never hear from it again. A bad router is a very different beast… difficult to set up, continually dropping your broadband connection, wireless signal poor and a connection elusive. It’s a real nightmare.
The consumer router market has a few primary players battling in your big box store, in the form of Belkin, D-Link, Netgear and Linksys by Cisco who have spent the last few years building routers that are faster, easier to connect to, more reliable and offer an increasing array of added value features. It’s fair to say, that the experience of setting up and configuring a router has improved greatly (although there are still a few shockers out there) and with the fastest wireless networking standard, 802.11n finally ratified, we should expect reliability to continue to harden over time.
For the home server owner, the router is an essential part of the network set-up. In most consumer homes it’s the magic that ensures home computers connect to the home server reliably and of course, is the gateway to accessing your computers remotely. Windows Home Server’s ability to automatically configure routers for remote access using the uPnP (Universal Plug and Play) standard is notoriously unreliable, thanks to haphazard implementation by the various router manufacturers, and so many of you will be used to digging under the hood of your router to forward the necessary ports to get remote access working.
Of course, it’s that set and forget experience that all of us desire, and in the back end of 2009, Cisco released their latest router, the verbosely named Linksys Dual Band Wireless-N ADSL 2+ Modem Gigabit Router WAG320N promising lightning fast speeds and reliability, courtesy of a dual-band, Wireless-N, Wi-Fi Internet connection and integrated modem plus 4, high speed Gigabit Ethernet ports. Bells and whistles delivered courtesy of an integrated StorageLink port, which makes all music, video and photos stored on an attached USB hard drive device accessible to uPnP compatible media players – an unnecessary feature for home server owners, but a neat entry level feature for users wanting to turn a standard USB hard drive into a mini NAS device.
What’s in the Box?
The WAG320N comes equipped with all necessary cables required to get up and running. You’ll find:
- Dual-Band Wireless-N ADSL2+ Modem Gigabit Router
- Setup Software and User Guide on CD-ROM
- Ethernet Network Cable
- Phone Cable
- Power Adaptor
