Edimax Broadband Gigabit Wireless N Router

30 March 2009, 9:29 pm

Well, the world of wireless N and gigabit LAN was too much of a temptation. But at this price it wasn’t going to break the bank to give it a try. I had never heard of Edimax before today. But I have to say, the ease of set up shows just how far wireless technology and home networking have come in the last few years.

I had the whole thing up and running in less that half an hour. It easily plugged into the ADSL modem and the wired connection to the internet was working in a flash. In a few seconds later I had set up a WPA key and had secure wireless access for my laptop. Windows 7 found the router in a flash – in fact I used the SSID and password from the old wireless set up and the laptop found it all by itself.

The unit was purchased for $145, which makes it one of the cheapest gigabit wireless routers on the market as far as I can tell.

The wireless laptops in the network certainly seem to be loading pages a little faster even though my laptop doesn’t have a N wireless card – sadly, still using G. But the signal from the router is strong and it seems stable. I’m looking forward to joining together some network attached storage and the desktop at gigabit speeds so that moving large files will be pretty quick.

I haven’t tried streaming media across the wireless network yet but I’ll let you know whether there is any improvement on that front when I have a moment to try it.

So this is very much a first couple of hours review. I’ll update this shortly with some more detail.