TrendNet TEW-635BRM review

At £90, we were expecting plenty of features from Trendnet’s latest ADSL router, the TEW-635BRM. In fact, it can do a couple of things that aren’t within the scope of your average consumer router, but at £30 more than high-performance devices from D-Link and Linksys, it has plenty to prove. A quick setup wizard built into the router’s web interface takes you through the process of configuring the router to work with your ADSL connection.

With that complete, you’ll want to secure and configure your wireless connection. The first step is to select your region; otherwise you’ll only be allowed to use wireless channel 11. You can and should also set up a WPA2 password to secure your wireless network from unwanted intruders. It’s not immediately obvious how to do this – you have to click on a button marked Configure SSID1 to find it.

The router has an additional Guest SSID, which allows you to create a second 2.4GHz wireless network with different access and security settings; perfect for visiting users that you wish to provide with internet access but want to restrict from the rest of your network. Another uncommon option is the ability to switch the router into modem-only mode, making it easier to connect to a standard Ethernet router, which could be handy if you ever need to buy one with special features that the TEW-635BRM lacks or upgrade to a new wireless standard down the line.

Other, more common, options are available from the Advanced menu, including a schedulable keyword-based URL filter, the ability to block certain types of internet traffic by choosing from an easy-to-use list of port to restrict, DDNS from DynDNS or TZO, plus some rather basic QoS options that aren’t too hard to configure but lack presets.

The router’s performance in most of our throughput tests was mediocre at best, managing just 36.6Mbit/s at 1m and 37Mbit/s at 10m with our Centrino 2 laptop, but we were pleasantly surprised to find that its performance at 20m was an exceptional 31.9Mbit/s – fast enough for smooth HD video streaming, should you insist on doing so wirelessly. If you have a lot of space to cover, the TEW-635BRM is worth a look, but most users will do just as well with Linksys’s cheaper WAG160N-UK.