Linksys by Cisco WRT610N review

£119
Price when reviewed

Linksys by Cisco’s unobtrusive flying saucer design is common across its consumer range of routers, and the cable-compatible WRT610N is no different. Place it on a shelf in your living room and it won’t stick out like a sore thumb.

Linksys by Cisco WRT610N review

It will do wonders for wireless performance though. It’s a dual-band router with two radios, which means legacy devices can access the network over 2.4GHz while modern laptops connect over 5GHz at the same time.

Other features worthy of note are four Gigabit Ethernet ports and a USB port that allows you to share external storage devices, stream files from it to network-attached UPnP media players, and act as an FTP server.

We test router speeds using a laptop equipped with Intel’s dual band WiFi Link 5300 chip and transfer files to and from this laptop to another connected to the router via a Gigabit Ethernet port.All-round performance in our tests was good.

And, once we’d upgraded to the latest firmware, we achieved file transfers from the WRT610N to the test laptop of up to 118Mbits/sec at close range over 5GHz, and 85Mbits/sec over 2.4GHz.

Linksys by Cisco WRT610N

Its speeds aren’t quite as quick as the some other simultaneous dual-band routers we’ve tested, but perhaps more importantly it boasts good range in both bands; in our long-range transmit tests it achieved 82Mbits/sec over 2.4GHz and 54Mbits/sec over 5GHz – very fast indeed.

It performed well in our torture tests too, allowing us to watch an iPlayer stream, listen to internet radio, make a VoIP call, connect to our office VPN and carry out file transfers at the same time without falling over or choking bandwidth to the audio and video streams.

There are a couple of things missing – no hardware VPN support nor guest network support – but the WRT610N is otherwise a quick, competent dual-band router with good range at a reasonable price. For high performance wireless, it gets our thumbs-up.

Details

WiFi standard802.11n
Modem typeCable

Wireless standards

802.11a supportyes
802.11b supportyes
802.11g supportyes
802.11 draft-n supportyes

LAN ports

Gigabit LAN ports4
10/100 LAN ports0

Features

MAC address cloningyes
Wireless bridge (WDS)no
Interior antennae6
Exterior antennae0
802.11e QoSyes
User-configurable QoSyes
UPnP supportyes
Dynamic DNSyes

Security

WEP supportyes
WPA supportyes
WPA Enterprise supportyes
WPS (wireless protected setup)yes
MAC address filteringyes
DMZ supportyes
VPN supportyes
Port forwarding/virtual serveryes
Web content filteringyes
Email alertsno
Activity/event loggingyes

Dimensions

Dimensions227 x 179 x 39mm (WDH)

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