Billion BiPAC 6300NXL review

Billion’s chunky business oriented routers aren’t much to look at, but the company has forged a reputation for reliable hardware with all the features you’ll need for a home, small, or mid-sized office. The Billion BiPac 6300NXL is a Gigabit Ethernet Router that can also connect to the internet via a 4G mobile broadband dongle if you connect one. The 6300NXL is described as a fibre router, but note that it doesn’t actually have a built-in modem for this and you’ll still have to connect it to the one supplied by your ISP.

At the back of the router are connectors for its two detachable wireless antennas. All the ports are also at the back: one Gigabit WAN port, four Gigabit LAN ports and two USB3 ports. There’s also a hard power switch, a recessed factory reset button and a WPS button.

The router’s wireless network isn’t password protected by default, so your first move should be to follow the instructions in the supplied quick install manual to secure it. Although Billion’s web interface may at first seem daunting, it’s very clearly laid out and the Quick Start wizard takes you through configuring all critical features, including connecting to mobile broadband. The router supports a wide range of dongles and the connection information required for most of the major UK networks is included in the accompanying manual.

Although Billion’s web interface may at first seem daunting, it’s very clearly laid out

We were very disappointed by the router’s wireless performance. It only supports the 2.4GHz 802.11n standard, but even taking this into account, Wi-Fi transfer speeds were unacceptably slow. Our testing environment is admittedly cluttered by multiple devices using the same frequency band, but other routers, including many from Billion, haven’t shown such poor performance under the circumstances.

Testing with our Centrino 2 laptop’s integrated wireless adaptor, we got transfer speeds of 18.9Mbit/s at 1m, 19.5Mbit/s at 10m and 7.9Mbit/s at 20m. Billion’s own BiPac 3010ND adaptor fared even worse: 18.7Mbit/s at 1m, 14.9Mbit/s at 10m and 7.1Mbit/s at 20m. It’s worth noting that these were the best results we were able to obtain after significant trial and error using different channels. The router’s ineffective automatic channel detection always defaulted to channel 11, which proved to be cluttered and slow in our labs.

If wireless isn’t very important to you, then this £80 router is otherwise well equipped with features. You can set up your 3G connection as a backup option should your main internet connection fail, isolate different Ethernet ports from one another to create separate virtual networks and set port ranges or IP addresses for QoS traffic prioritization. Unlike more home-oriented hardware, you have to configure this manually rather than use pull-down menus that let you choose popular programs or types of traffic to prioritise, but this also gives you a great deal more control over what gets dibs on your net connection.

However, no concessions are made to those who aren’t very comfortable with networking or prepared to read through all the necessary documentation, even for something that’s usually as simple as plugging in an external USB drive and making it accessible to the network. Even if you are a fan of Billion’s no-nonsense interface, £70 is a lot to pay given this router’s failings. We prefer the similarly priced Tenda W1800R, which supports the latest 802.11ac Wi-Fi standard.