Tenda W307R Wireless-N Broadband Router review

Tenda is a Chinese manufacturer that’s just started shipping to the UK, and the W307R is the first wireless router we’ve seen from the company. It’s a budget model, but it has dual antennas so it supports a theoretical top speed of 300Mbits/s. It also comes with a three-year warranty. However it’s worth pointing out that despite the word ‘Broadband’ in the name, the W307R doesn’t contain a modem, so it’s not suitable if you have an ADSL service.

Setting the W307R up is fairly straightforward. A Quick Setup guide takes you through the first steps of plugging the router in correctly, and then you can either run the software on the mini-CD provided, or you can access the router’s management page by browsing to the IP address that’s written on the underside of the router. There’s a Setup Wizard menu item in this interface, but it doesn’t prompt you to set up wireless security.

The software, on the other hand, can auto-detect your WAN settings (the connection to your ISP) and performs a test to check that it’s working, before prompting you to set up your wireless network. You’re asked to enter a name for your network (the SSID), the wireless mode (802.11b/g or 802.11b/g/n) and the channel.

The channel setting is best kept at Auto-select, which we found did a reasonably good job of picking a clear channel. The next screen asks you to set up security, but it’s set to Disabled by default. It would have been better if WPA2/AES was chosen by default, as the other options aren’t as secure and will be phased out over the next few years.

The management interface is pretty comprehensive, and despite some bad translations, most of the options have detailed explanations in a column to the right, so it’s not hard to work out what’s what. Quality of Service (QoS) is labelled as Traffic Control and only gives you crude bandwidth controls, while the URL Monitor is a basic form of parental control. Finer control of internet access is available under the Security Settings section, where you can limit access by client, port, MAC address or individual URL; if there’s only a small list of sites you wish young children to view, for example, the URL option could be used as a whitelist.

Despite some crude implementations such as these, the W307R supports most of the features you’d expect from a wireless router: UPnP, WPS and WDS for wireless, port forwarding, DMZ, and static routing. Speeds were good too; using our Centrino 2 laptop the W307R got over 40Mbits/s, whereas it only just hit this figure at close range with the Tenda W311U dongle.

For those with cable internet connections, the W307R has all the features you need at a very low price, and the fact that it achieves speeds over 40Mb/s make it excellent value, and it wins our Budget Buy award.