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Here are some of the other features you’ll find in the typical consumer router: USB storage devices, meanwhile, are slow and top out at 2TB, whereas a high-end NAS can deliver as much performance and storage capacity as a small server can. A printer with built-in networking features won’t limit you to the length of a USB cable when you deploy it. Although this might seem like an attractive feature in a router, anything but the tiniest small business will be better served by printers and NAS (network-attached storage) devices that have built-in networking capabilities.
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Through such ports, networked computers can easily share a USB printer and a USB hard drive. One feature you can expect to find in a high-end consumer router is one or even two USB ports. Typically these routers are also outfitted with a four-port ethernet switch, but they support wired connections at gigabit speeds, versus the 100-mbps switches on less-expensive routers. Routers in this class are often described as “N900” models here again, however, it’s not because they can deliver throughput to a single client at 900 mbps.
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These devices come outfitted with 3×3 antenna arrays and promise a theoretical throughput of 450 mbps on each band. You’ll never be able to connect a client to either network and expect it to stream data at 600 mbps, nor can you connect a single client to both networks simultaneously.ĭ-Link markets its DIR-857 as an N900 router.Move up the consumer market to the $200 price range, and you’ll see more-advanced dual-band routers from the same manufacturers. The N600 claim comes from summing the speeds of the two concurrent but independent 300-mbps networks. The industry refers to this class of router as “N600,” but the term is misleading because it implies that routers in this class can stream data at 600 mbps. Many people use the 2.4GHz band for data and Internet access, and reserve the 5GHz band for streaming audio and video over their network. The 5GHz band boasts 23 nonoverlapping channels, so it’s significantly less crowded, but it provides much less range. The 2.4GHz band delivers better range–but since it provides only two nonoverlapping channels, and since so many routers have been deployed, the spectrum has become congested. Many lower-end consumer routers are dual-band models, capable of operating wireless networks on both the 2.4GHz frequency band and the 5GHz band. The industry refers to this class of router as “N300.” You’ll never see real-world performance that fast, however overhead, distance between the client and the router, and environmental factors can whack that number down. Most routers in this class have 2×2 antenna arrays (two transmit and two receive antennas), which are capable of handling two 150-megabits-per-second spatial streams (one on each antenna) for a total theoretical throughput of 300 mbps.
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Even better, all the essential features seem to be in place, including compatibility with the IEEE 802.11n wireless networking standard, a four-port ethernet switch, wireless encryption, and a built-in firewall.