Trendnet TEW-672GR Dual Band N Gigabit Router - Network Performance and Final Thoughts

Network Performance:

As far as performance goes, we fired up iperf to do a little benchmarking on this router.  Iperf results show bandwidth that the network is actually capable of.  In the real world, you won't see wired transfer rates approaching 1000mpbs because hard drives are barely fast enough to read and write at this speed.  Also, CPU overhead becomes an issue when transferring this much data.  We use iperf with confidence as it shows how good the network hardware actually is and if it can perform anywhere close to its rated specs.

For reference we have compared the TEW-672GR with the DIR-655 and most recently the DGL-4500.  All of these routers support 802.11n and GB wired Ethernet.  A laptop was used to connect to the 802.11n network using the D-Link DWA-652 Xtreme N Notebook Adapter.  At my request Trendnet also supplied a Express Card based Wireless N adapter, but I soon discovered that I don't have an express card slot on my machine.  I will be following up with the TEW-642EC in the future however.

We ran through several instances of iperf and each instance transferred data for 5 minutes.  The results were averaged are displayed above.  As you can see the DIR-655 remains the 802.11n king while the DGL-4500 shows faster G/N mixed performance.  Unfortunately the TEW-672 trails both of these by a very large margin.  We re-ran the tests several times from different distances and the results always come back the same.  When it comes to a wired Ethernet connection the TEW-672GR comes right in the middle of the pack and outpaces the DIR-655, but lags behind the DGL-4500.  Keep in mind that network cable will play a major role here.  We used Cat.6 cable for our tests although Cat.5e is supposed to work with GB networks as well.

Final Thoughts:

The Trendnet TEW-672GR surprised me in terms of quality, looks and features.  It's been a while since I have used a Trendnet product and they have made a lot of improvements to their hardware.  One thing I especially enjoyed was the fast "reboot" time that clocked in at around 10 seconds.  One Netgear router I used took about a minute to reboot between each setting - the TEW-672GR is much, much faster than that.

While things have improved on several levels, the wireless performance at any distance is pretty dismal however.  It comes in about half the speed of the D-Link reference routers when running 802.11g/n mixed or straight 802.11n networks.  Wired performance is up to par though and it scores right in the middle of the pack.

My favorite feature is the multiple SSIDs and the WLAN switch - though I'm not really sure why.  If you could route different SSIDs to different IPs, web addresses and such, it would be incredibly handy.  The WLAN switch though really makes sense if you want to kill your WiFi for a while in order to stop the neighbors from leeching your bandwidth.

Pros:

• Affordable 10/100/1000 4-port router
• 10/100/1000 base WAN port
• Features port masking / forwarding
• Stealthy firewall
• WLAN on/off switch

Cons:

• Wireless performance quite poor
• No QoS features
  

Overall the TEW-672GR is a decent choice - although there are better ones out there.  The wired GB Ethernet is fast and it comes with an equally fast WAN port.  It has a host of wireless features but it lacks in the WiFi performance department.  Overall it should get the job done for most people, although if you're big into the wireless side of things, it may not be the best choice for you.

I'd like to thank Trendnet for sending this our way for a review.  Please feel free to post your comments in the forum at the link below.